“She is here,” Lyudmila said angrily, eyes working the darkness. Her hair stood up and a low growl emanated from her throat. “That whore is here.”
Harry kept his eyes fixed on his captor and his face impassive. “I guess you’re not as smart as you think.”
With a sharp cry, she grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and hurled him effortlessly into a pile of crates. He hit with a tremendous crash, and the impact knocked him semi-silly.
Lyudmila spread her arms wide, checking the ceiling, the rafters, and every corner of the room. “Where are you?” she called out.
Silence reigned in the room, broken only by a series of pants from Lyudmila and the heavy breathing of her boyfriend. A creaking board sounded in the far left corner. Piotr jerked his head in the direction of the sound, let out a hoarse roar, and immediately charged, only to run headlong into a series of rusty metal pipes. After hitting them with a tremendous crash, he got up shaking his head, and looked around stupidly in an attempt to figure out how he’d been fooled.
“Idiot,” Lyudmila hissed out. “She is here and toying with your stupidity...”
Another sound came from the far right corner, and once again, not thinking things through, Piotr charged. This time he ran into the wall, which knocked him flat on his back. He lay there groaning, and Lyudmila let out a string of words in Russian that which could only be curses. She kept checking the air, the shadows, and nothing came up. Extending her claws and settling into a fighting stance, she whirled around and screamed in rage, “Where are you, streetwalker?”
“Right behind you,” a voice answered.
Anastasia dropped from the ceiling and surprised the other cat-girl by punching her in the back of the head. The sharp snap of fist meeting flesh resounded through the room, and Lyudmila pitched forward. Anastasia followed up her initial strike by raining blows on the other cat-girl’s ears and head, and then switched to slashing at her neck, trying to get to her throat.
Lyudmila wasn’t ready to give up, though, and kept her chin down, protecting her most vital area. In a lightning fast move, she twisted sharply, grabbed Anastasia’s arm and tossed her into a stack of crates. They tumbled around her, and by now Piotr had gotten up and gotten a fix on her position. He tensed his body, and actually pawed the ground, ready to rumble. “Kill her!” Lyudmila cried.
Fear seized Harry, the fear of getting involved, but overriding that emotion was concern for his girlfriend’s life. Outside of his shadow boxing skills, he was no match for either of his captors and he knew it, but lying next to him was a crowbar. Yeah, he thought, that would work.
Getting to his feet, he lifted it into position and waited. Piotr started his charge just as Anastasia dazedly got to her feet. The rhino-boar ran closer, and Harry stepped up to the plate, swinging for the fences—and connected.
The crowbar caught Piotr just under his jaw and staggered him, and moving faster than even he thought possible, Harry ran behind the massive Russian and brained him, aiming for the sore spot and once again connecting. Piotr collapsed in a heap, and Lyudmila, now wild with fury, rushed him. “I will kill you myself!” she screamed.
Anastasia burst out of the pile of wrecked crates and grabbed Lyudmila’s hair. With a sharp yank, she spun Lyudmila around and punched her square in her nose. Blood jetted into the air, and Lyudmila staggered backwards. Anastasia finished the job by whipping her tail in a short, sharp arc, which hit the other cat-girl squarely across the temples. Lyudmila fell to the floor in a heap.
“Don’t ever call me a whore,” Anastasia said, glaring at her foe, and kicked her in the side for good measure. Hands on hips, she panted heavily at first, but regained her breath after a few seconds.
She switched her gaze to Harry. “You’re staring.”
Was he? No mirror was handy, but he took her word for it. “Uh, you’re pretty terrific,” he mumbled, somewhat ashamed that he hadn’t summoned up the necessary ball-power to help out more.
A contented aah sound came from her, somewhere between a purr and a growl. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You got some pretty fancy moves with that crowbar.”
“It compensates for me not having claws or super strength,” he answered.
Anastasia’s eyebrows arched so high they almost met her hairline. “Are you...are you jealous that I’m this way?”
“No,” he immediately responded, taken somewhat by surprise. He hadn’t really expected her to ask that question. “I’m not. It’s just that—”
“It’s just what?”
He couldn’t formulate an answer, not one that she’d readily understand. Being weak—nobody—he’d never wanted this life. It had been thrust upon him, and as hard as he might try, he couldn’t alter the physical component of himself. Mentally, he might have stood heads above a lot of others, but physically, he didn’t rate much above their ankles, and he knew it.
Shuffling his feet didn’t help his case very much. Perhaps Anastasia understood his anguish and perhaps not, for she asked in a very sweet way, “Are you jealous that I have powers? Because if you are, then think again. I didn’t ask for this. Someone did this to me. I use what I’ve got to survive, not because it gives me a thrill to be able to jump high or claw someone up. I was listening before, listening to what that other she-cat said. She gets off on hurting others. I don’t.”
Something deep inside him, a little worm of indecision or maybe a worm of unworthiness, wriggled its way up to the surface. “I was, uh, thinking that, if you met another guy who had, I don’t know,” he scratched his head, “the same ability you do, that—”
A loud exhalation of breath from her cut him off at the pass. “I get it,” she interrupted. “You think that I’d leave you?”
He felt the blood rush to his face. Ashamed to admit the truth and not wanting her to see his embarrassment, he turned his gaze to the ground and gave an offhand shrug. “Yes,” he mumbled.
“Look at me, Harry.”
The tone in Anastasia’s voice compelled him to do so, and she wore a strange and rather wise smile. “I am what I am and I’ve come to terms with it. Didn’t I tell you before that if I couldn’t be fully human I’d be happy this way?”
“You said so.”
“Well there you have it,” she tossed at him, as if the truth was self-evident.
Numbly, he dropped the bar, grateful to be alive and doubly grateful his girlfriend had come back for him. “Glad you made it,” he choked out and mentally kicked himself for acting so emotional.
Anastasia threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly, her fur tickling his skin, yet strangely it felt comfortable and totally natural. If this was how his relationship was going to go with her, if she cared that much, then what else was there to do but to go with it? Right now, he didn’t think of anything else except that he wanted to stay with her for the rest of his life.
Her next statement confirmed things for him. “Did you think I’d ever leave you?” she chided. “I followed you down to the police station. Alleys, remember? I hid out there, and when these two,” she spat on the floor near them to indicate her distaste, “broke you out, I kept up the trail.”
Amazed at her detective skills, he said, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
Offering a shrug, she whispered into his ear, her voice, low, throaty, sexy, and altogether winning, “I know your scent. And I like it.”
Nonplussed by her response and feeling totally drained by his mini-ordeal, he asked, “What are we going to do about these two?”
“We tie them up and hand them over to the authorities,” she said with an air of practicality. “That should prove to everyone we’re not the bad guys here. What else can we do?”
“If you’re looking for a suggestion, I’ve got one,” said someone whose voice was hoarse and rough from drinking too much or smoking too many cigarettes. “I’m gonna suggest that you give yourselves up, mutants, and stick your hands up, too.”
Whirling around, Harry saw no less than twenty
people standing just inside the doorway, armed with knives, baseball bats, crowbars, and rope. One of them carried what looked to be a blowtorch. They all wore looks of incredulity on their faces, and there wasn’t one smile among them, not unless you counted the mean variety.
“Who are you?” he asked, aware that his question had to be one of the oldest and probably one of the dumbest questions in the book. While he wanted to say something pithy, nothing really came to mind.
“We’re the welcoming committee,” a man said, pushing his way to the front. Tall and lean with a mean, scarred face and a pair of cold blue eyes, he carried a wicked looking blade in his hands, at least ten inches long and slightly curved. “You’re not welcome.”
Chapter Eight: Lynch Mob
For a moment, time hung in the balance, the air seemed to stop circulating, and the world stopped spinning on its axis. No one said a word, no one moved, and everyone waited for the first play by the other side. The crowd jostled each other, but gently, all in the name of seeing the two cat-girls and the monstrosity lying on the floor.
Harry broke the ice, swallowing a few times and feeling like he was about to face the worst that humanity had to offer. “This, uh, this isn’t what it looks like,” he said, slowly backing up and gently pushing Anastasia behind him.
This mob—and there was no other word for it—wanted blood, but he had the uncomfortable feeling that if push came to shove, it would be their blood spilled, and not that of the transgenics. As for himself, he wasn’t so sure.
“Go ahead and tell us what it looks like,” said a mean-faced woman with a mop of wild red hair shoved carelessly under a woolen cap. “I can see it with my own eyes, and I don’t like what I see.”
If Harry wasn’t certain of the crowd’s intentions, Anastasia seemed to be very sure and shoved away his hand in order to stand alongside him. “If you don’t like what you see, why don’t you say it straight out?” she asked in a mild voice. “Since you’re here, you could listen to our side of the story.”
Behind the mildness, though, there lay an edge of barely contained fury. She’d already demonstrated how well she could fight against enhanced people. If she really cut loose, then the majority of people in this mob, armed though they were, wouldn’t stand a chance.
The leader blinked, along with the rest of the group members. Clearly, he was expecting some kind of walkover. “You...you can talk?”
“I can,” she answered, bringing her claws out slowly and holding up her hands so that everyone could see. “I eat food, too, and sing and dance. How about all of you dance your way out of here? Go home and forget about all of this. I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Playing with them—she was playing with them, Harry thought, and it was working. They were on the edge of—maybe—calling the whole thing off...and then Anastasia crossed her arms over her chest and challenged, “I’m waiting.”
Indecision showed on the leader’s face for a brief moment, but then a meaner look than earlier broke through. Apparently, he didn’t like having his authority, such as it was, trampled on. “All right, you can talk,” he stated. “You can talk, so just answer me this before we take you down. Who iced those agents up in the Catskills? Who killed all those FBI people?”
Murmuring broke out among the members present and they moved restlessly, tapping their sticks, bats, and metal rods in their hands. It seemed as though they didn’t want to waste any time getting to the good part...but they’d have to. A few seconds passed, the murmurs turned into squabbles over what to do, and finally the leader held up a fist indicating that he wanted a little silence. More quiet followed, and Anastasia broke the calm first.
“It wasn’t him,” she said, pointing to Harry. “He had nothing to do with it. I didn’t either,” she added. Stabbing a finger at the now-stirring duo on the floor, she stated, “They’re the real killers.”
Mr. Leader took a tentative step forward, squinting in the dim light. “So what in the hell is really going on here? What are you? Is this some kind secret government experiment that the President’s been hiding from us? Or is this some type of mutant war? Are you fighting between yourselves or against the rest of us?” He swept his hand backward to indicate his fellow members. “What exactly are you?”
“She’s a transgenic,” Harry piped up.
“What the hell does that mean?” someone called out.
“It means she was a guy once and now she’s a girl,” another man said. Large, bald, in his twenties, he carried a length of chain in his meaty hands and nodded with certainty at his answer.
Harry didn’t know whether to display a face-palm, shake his head, or wonder where that person’s education went wrong—if he’d ever made it out of junior high. Even the man’s friends stared at him. “There’s just no cure for stupid,” Anastasia muttered, and even a few of the mob members laughed.
“Uh, buddy,” Harry addressed the man, “transgenic means that someone mixed animals genes with human DNA. Trust me, she’s a girl.”
“Oh.”
Dumb response received, Harry explained further and raised his voice. “I’m a researcher. I’m trying to help my, uh, girlfriend, become human again.”
His remark brought gasps of disbelief. “You’re a researcher?” one woman asked. “You’re a kid. And that thing can’t be your girlfriend!”
Anastasia’s eyes narrowed, and Harry’s first thought was Oh, here we go again.
“Well, if one of you has a smartphone, look on the Internet under the name of Marvin Goldman. He was my father. He was a transgenic researcher and I’m doing the same thing,” Harry offered, heartily wishing that no one would keep referring to him as a kid. When was this going to end, when he was thirty? It had to be the curse of looking like a baby robin.
“And there’s something else,” he added. “Anastasia is not a thing. She’s a girl, and yeah, she’s my girlfriend.”
More muttering broke out, this time of a deeper, more primal variety. Now the collective look of the people here shifted from a loosely cobbled together group of individuals that had formed into a mob to that of a pack with one goal, one purpose, and he knew that this wasn’t going to end well.
As if scripted, the leader took another step forward, swinging his knife back and forth in a steady, rhythmical manner.
After taking a few steps forward and throwing a cautious glance at the two fallen transgenics, he put up his hand as a signal for the rest of the group to stop. They halted, waiting. “All right, say we believe you,” he said. “We take you in,” the rest of the people moved forward en masse as he spoke, “and you explain yourself to the authorities. They’ll listen.”
Listening to this crap, it sounded just as insincere as when he’d first heard it, and Harry instinctively retreated. He expected that Anastasia would do the same. She didn’t though, and stayed right where she was. “They don’t believe me,” he said to her, and then directed his next comment at the mob. “I just got taken to jail and broken out of jail a short time ago.”
“He’s right,” another man called out, holding up a smartphone. “I heard it on the news. The Forty-Third Precinct got raided, eighty people dead, most of them cops. This kid couldn’t have done it, not by himself. Look at him—he’s a skinny weak punk.”
“Thanks a lot,” Harry said. Truth or not, it stung.
“So he had a little help,” Mr. Leader snarled. This time he marched forward until he stood three feet away from Harry. “We’ll take you in, take in the cat-ladies and that...whatever it is,” he added, pointing at Piotr who’d just shaken himself awake, “and you can explain yourself.”
From the narrowed eyes, the savage grins, the smirks, and the fact that everyone was either waving a chain or a knife or something lethal, it was a given that they’d do no such thing. Harry smelled something now, different from the odors in the room. He smelled fear and hatred along with something darker, more primal, and it didn’t come from his girlfriend or the Russian duo.
It was somet
hing that emanated from the mob, a feeling of something deep and ancient that the human race had suppressed thousands of years ago, but had never suppressed entirely. It was the fear of the unknown, and fear often led to irrational mindsets. Kill the outsider. Kill that which is different. Make them pay for their crimes, we’ll deliver our own version of justice and explain our position later.
By now, both mad Russians had gotten to their feet, Lyudmila with her claws out and extended, Piotr pawing the ground. They had their eyes fixed on their targets, and sensing the ensuing bloodbath, Harry made one last push for peace. “Guys, you’d better back off.”
Lyudmila surveyed the mob with disdain and her voice dripped with barely disguised hatred. “All these pathetic wretches think that they are going to hurt us?”
Another gasp came from the group.
Harry then chimed in, “I gotta tell you, my girlfriend doesn’t want to ruin anyone’s day, but these two others do. It’s your choice.”
“You can’t find yourself a regular girl, so you’re going out with a cat-lady?” one person asked. “She’s a friggin’ freak!”
More voices called out insults, the insults turned to threats, and finally, instead of either of the mad Russians taking the first shot, Anastasia growled, “The hell with this. They just messed with the wrong person.”
Messing was what the mob had in mind. Human nature—the worst parts of it—overrode reason, and giving a collective cry of rage, the mob charged as one, their weapons raised high, ready for the kill.
Both cat-girls leapt back a distance of perhaps twenty feet. As Anastasia did so, she grabbed Harry’s shoulder and pulled him back with her, landing lightly on her feet. Once at the far wall, she said, “Stay here. I’ll come back for you.”
With a snarl, she charged forward and slashed at the mob members. Her moves, fast and sure, struck out at limbs and hands, causing the people to drop their weapons. With even faster strikes, she temporarily immobilized them in an effort to disarm and not kill.
Rise of the Transgenics Page 13
