Anastasia’s voice broke through the fog of sleep and roused him. “Hey, get up.”
Instantly, he came to, blinking the crud from his eyes. “What time is it?” he asked. He found that he’d slumped to the floor, seated near the window, and a river of shame ran through him. He should have been guarding the room.
“It’s five in the morning,” she said. “Don’t worry about passing out. You went to sleep just a couple of minutes ago. I was up before that. I heard a car just a few seconds ago. It has to be Farrell.”
Still more than a little embarrassed, Harry got up and looked out the window. It was indeed Farrell’s car. The agent exited the vehicle, pulled out his pistol and ran over, shouting, “Harry, Anastasia, what’s going on? Should I be worried if something’s out there?”
“Put your gun away and come in,” answered Harry, wondering what to say. The smell of blood still permeated the air. He’d opened the windows for some fresh air, but nothing could wipe away the smell. It lay like a second coat on his body and he couldn’t brush it off.
Farrell walked in and immediately held his nose. “God, what happened?”
“Nightmare walking,” Anastasia said and pointed to Istvan. “He knows the thing that did it. There are probably others, too.”
Her words didn’t seem to have much of an effect on Farrell. Ever the hard-ass, he swept the room with his gaze, which settled on the two covered corpses. Striding over to them, he bent down and pulled back the blankets.
“Jesus Christ,” he murmured as a look of horror combined with disgust crossed his face. That look soon faded, though and one of anger replaced it. Straightening up, he demanded, “I knew those men. I handpicked them for this assignment. What did this?”
“Like I said, nightmare walking,” Anastasia repeated. “It was worse than Ivan, if you can believe it. The monster’s gone for now, but he’ll be back.”
Farrell reached into his pocket, whipped out his cellphone, spoke softly into it and put it away. “All right, I just called the people at headquarters. They’ll be waiting. Let’s move.”
“What about the people here?” Harry asked.
“I’ll get my own crew to clean this place up,” Farrell replied and motioned to the door. “We have to move.” He locked eyes with Istvan. “You are coming with us. Get going.”
He went to the door to check things out. A second later, he gestured for everyone to follow him. His body shaking, Istvan moved out, glancing around fearfully as he crossed the threshold. Harry and Anastasia brought up the rear.
Farrell eased into the driver’s seat and the three transgenics sat in the back. As they drove down the hill, they passed a convenience store and Anastasia grunted. “You remember that place, don’t you?”
Harry did. Three days earlier, after they’d finished their combat training routine, he’d wandered into the bathroom to take stock of what they needed. Some things couldn’t be brought up by the agents, so Harry had walked outside to the car wearing a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. It hid the fur. It couldn’t hide his features, though. He’d shaved the hair from his face, but his eyes and whiskers were a dead giveaway. As for the whiskers, he’d clipped them, but they usually grew back within a few hours.
Opening the car door, he heard a shout, and Anastasia jogged over to him wearing a yellow track-suit and a hoodie. “I’m going with you,” she stated in no uncertain terms.
“I’m just going down the hill to the convenience store,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t come along. However, the look in her eyes, one of determination, meant that there was no way in the world that he could dissuade her.
Anastasia strolled around to the passenger side and got in. “I’ve got cabin fever. The agents bring us food and we never go out, so let’s go.” Once he got in, she added in a more placating tone, “I’ll stay in the car once we get there, okay?”
Thinking that this was a very bad idea, but having no choice, Harry started the motor. “You get carsick, remember?”
“It’s just down the hill. And I don’t want to run in the daytime.”
“Yeah... okay.”
Misgivings aside, Harry revved the motor and took off. A few minutes later, they arrived at a convenience store. He went in, grabbed a basket and began to load it up. Razors, candy bars, a few items for Anastasia... check. He took the basket over to the cash register, where an extremely overweight man in his forties sat behind a counter, reading a newspaper and ignoring the world.
In addition to him, there were three other people in the store, two large young men who looked like weightlifters—thick necks and torsos—and a young kid, maybe fifteen or so. The kid darted around, filling up a small basket, and one of the big men stepped in front of him, blocking his way. “Try going around me.”
Harry heard the sneer in man’s voice and a pang of painful memories resounded in his mind. Punking time... and this kid was the one being punked. Short and skinny, he reminded Harry of himself before the transformation. While he wasn’t any taller now—he stood around five-eight and weighed maybe one-sixty—he was far stronger and faster than he looked.
“I need to buy something,” the kid piped out in a high-pitched voice.
“Buy it somewhere else,” the large dude responded.
Casting a frightened and resigned glance around him, the kid put down his basket and took off, which provoked a snicker from the bigger man and his friend. This was all wrong, Harry thought, but he wasn’t about to cause trouble.
Things—he had to buy things, and he went over to the counter. The man did nothing except to whistle tonelessly under his breath and read his newspaper. “Excuse me,” Harry said after waiting a minute for a response and not getting one. He rapped the counter and waited. Why people had to be rude was beyond him, but he didn’t make the rules. He just tried to be polite. “I’d like to buy these things, please.”
With glacial slowness, the man put down the paper and turned around as if he was doing the world a favor by doing so. Once he got a good look at Harry, a look of alarm crossed his face. “Hey, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but what’s wrong with your eyes and what’s with the fur? Are you an actor or just a freak?”
That remark crossed over from rude into asshat territory. Harry had always shaved on a daily basis. His body, no, it retained a light coating of fur, but his face, once clean, looked almost human. Not that he minded looking as he did. It was what others thought that concerned him.
As for his eyes, he silently cursed for not wearing his sunglasses. He usually wore them in public, but in his haste, he’d forgotten them inside the car. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s all good,” he said.
The two other guys in their twenties, big, beefy, with overdeveloped biceps and t-shirts cut to display their arm growth overheard the question. One of them nudged the other and they ambled over. “Hey Tim,” one of them said to the cashier. “Is this guy giving you trouble or what?”
“There’s no trouble,” said Harry, trying to avoid a conflict. Before the transformation, he would have backed off. He’d been skinny and weak and got used to being picked on, beaten up and discarded like so much of yesterday’s garbage. But that was before, not now. Still, he didn’t see this as a life-or-death situation.
Unfortunately, the other two guys did. The man who’d spoken poked him on the shoulder. “You got a problem, buddy?”
“I don’t know, Mark,” the older man said. In a split second, his look of surprise changed to one of meanness, his mouth twisting into a slit. “I heard about those animal people in the city a few months back. You look like one of them, sort of. I thought it was a joke, but maybe they were on the up and up.”
“No problem and no trouble,” Harry repeated, eyeing the door. The man’s other friend stepped in front of the entrance, barring all possibility of escape.
“Hear that, Joey?” the large dude said to his friend at the door. “This guy doesn’t want any trouble.” He snatched the basket from Harry’s hand and his voice dripped w
ith sarcasm—that, and malice. “Well, let’s see what Mr. I no want trouble has.” His meaty hand dipped into the goods. “You got razors, candy bars and tampons. So, are the tampons for you or for your girlfriend?” he asked with a throaty chuckle.
At that point, Harry really wanted to let fly... but insult or not, he decided to give it a pass. He’d pay and leave—that was the plan. With a lightning-fast move, he grabbed the basket back, but the other man noticed his hand. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “You got yellow eyes and... fur?”
Harry didn’t bother answering. These morons would find out sooner or later, so he rolled up his sleeve and showed off his forearm, fur and all. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m the same all over. Is there a problem?”
In an instant, the big dude’s mean look disappeared. An expression of fear replaced it and he gulped. Legs shaking, he took a step back, but reached for his pocket. “You’re some kind of a freak and...”
He never got a chance to answer, as Harry dropped the basket, trapped the man’s arm with his left hand and extended his claws on his right hand. Wicked-looking things, he shoved them under the man’s chin to the point of nearly breaking the skin. There were times when a person could stand the insults. Right there and then, he decided that this time was not one of them. “That wouldn’t be the word I’d use, buddy,” he growled. “I’m the kind of person you don’t want to meet.”
“Aah...” the large dude said in a choked voice. The front of his pants suddenly got wet. “I’m... I’m sorry.” He twisted his head around to look for his friend. “Joey, you gonna help me, man?”
“I don’t think he can,” a familiar voice sang out.
Harry swiveled his head around and saw Anastasia at the doorway, her hoodie down. The fur on her neck and the top of her head stood on end and her tail lashed the air. She took up a position right behind Joey with her claws near his throat. Joey was trembling all over and seemed incapable of speech. “Now, here’s what you’re going to do,” Anastasia instructed the quivering Joey. “You’re going to leave. My boyfriend and I are busy. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah... yeah, I got it,” he managed to squeak out.
She released him and he took off. Harry let go of the other punk and he made a beeline for the door. Anastasia stepped aside to let him pass, but stuck her foot out at the last second. He tripped and sprawled flat on his face. “Leave!” she hissed.
Wet pants and all, he picked himself up and ran to join his friend, stumbling as he went. Harry felt a faint smile come over his face and turned to the cashier, who was by now shaking like a leaf in a storm. His face read fifty shades of terrified. “Hey, I support PETA, you know?”
Harry laid down thirty dollars. “So do I. Keep the change.”
Sticking out his elbow, Anastasia linked arms with him and together they strolled out into the sunshine. “Nice job with the other punk,” he offered.
Once they were back in the car, Anastasia’s mood of jauntiness vanished. She sat in her seat, hands clasped in her lap. When she looked at him, it was with a mixture of amusement and despair. “You can talk about easy, but I don’t want to have to go through this every day. I just want to have a normal life, as normal as possible, I mean.”
“I know. That’s why I’m working on a way to turn us back to, uh, what we were.”
She gave a slight nod. “If it works, I’m up for it.”
Harry meant what he said, but he also knew that up until he did find a way to reverse the procedure, then things would never be normal. Once back at the cabin, he called Farrell and told him about the incident. Naturally, the older man screamed at him for going out without an escort. He drove up the next day, his car throwing up a cloud of dirt as he screeched to a stop outside the cabin and ran over to the door.
“Just so you know, kid,” he began as soon as the front door opened, “I told the clerk at the store that a movie was being filmed here. He believed me when I said some of the extras were walking around.”
It was a BS excuse, but this was the closest people had come to discovering their existence, and Harry wasn’t into show-and-tell, not yet. Since the fights three months before with Lyudmila and Piotr, most of the populace in and around New York wanted to know about the transgenics.
Officially, all four had been caught and were being held in an undisclosed location. That was the story concocted by the FBI and New York’s finest. So far, it seemed to be working... but incidents like this, Farrell reminded them, could bring the reporters. “And I don’t want the press to find out about this. It’s not time.”
“Is it ever going to be time?” Anastasia asked. Anguish crept into her voice. “I know what I am and what I look like. But it’s everyone else that’s going to have to get comfortable with me—us,” she corrected herself so as to include Harry—”and I don’t want to live in solitary confinement for the rest of my life. I’m not even an American citizen yet.”
A look of sorrow came over Farrell’s face. He wasn’t the type to show emotion readily. Hard-ass persona or not, he’d always been there to lend a hand. “I’m hoping that one day you won’t have to worry about it. But right now, you do, and so do we. And I’m still working on the papers for you. I promised, and I intend to keep my promise...”
A low moan broke through Harry’s trip down memory lane. Istvan started at the sound. “What is wrong with her?”
“She gets carsick,” Harry explained.
“Oh.”
“Anyone want a barf bag?” Farrell called out.
Anastasia grunted, stifled another moan and said, “Just shut up and drive.”
Upon reaching Manhattan two hours later, they entered FBI headquarters through an underground garage and Farrell took them to Harry’s former laboratory. “We’ve got some of the best computer techs working for us, tracking down the sources and extrapolating all the information,” Farrell explained as he led them inside. “Meet the team.”
In spite of the terrors, he’d encountered only a few hours ago, Harry cracked a smile at the two people sitting in front of a row of desktop computers. “Jason, Tina, how’s it going?”
Jason Parham, a tall and lean nineteen year-old—the same age as Harry—nodded hello. He and Harry had been best friends since junior high, but while Harry went into the field of transgenic research, Jason had stuck to his games and computer work. Tall and lean to the point of emaciation and extremely geeky looking with long, straight black hair down to his shoulders, he sat next to his girlfriend. “I’m doing okay,” Jason said. “I got my computers and my partner in crime, er, justice with me.” He indicated Tina with a nod.
Tina Mazerowski, also tall and lean and dark-haired, was no less a tech nerd, but was the more outgoing of the two, with a pretty face and sparkling green eyes. She nodded as well.
However, when they got a good look at Istvan, their jaws simultaneously hit the floor. With a look of uncertainty, Tina eyed Istvan and then shifted her gaze to Harry. “I thought I was seeing twins. First it was a cat and now I’m looking at two cat people and a...” she started to say.
“You mean a pig,” Anastasia finished. “Yeah, he’s that way, and Harry and I are this way. Deal with it. We have.”
Jason shrugged. He’d seen Harry three months back when the changes began and was used to it. But as for Tina, it seemed that she was having a hard time processing reality.
“Since when did you start working for the FBI?” Harry asked in order to break the slight blanket of tension that hung in the air. Farrell stood beside them with a smirk on his face. “Did you volunteer or—”
“We recruited them,” Farrell interrupted. “They know more about hacking than anyone else, and Jason’s your friend, so we reached an agreement.”
Harry suppressed a grin while Anastasia’s eyebrows arched in amazement at the display of hardware. “And what do you get out of it?” she asked.
Jason swept his arm around the room and a grin crossed his face. “What do we get? Talk about unlim
ited computer time, class credit and a humongous paycheck, that’s what.” He folded his arms across his narrow chest. “Gaming heaven, man, that’s what it’s all about to me.”
Farrell noisily cleared his throat and pointed at the computers. Jason amended his statement by saying, “After work, I mean. The job comes first. The only drawback is the hours,” he added, and put his hand over his mouth to stifle a yawn. “Irregular schedules suck.”
“It’s a lot better than school, but we still have to go,” Tina added. “Who’s Porky?”
Istvan’s already pink face turned chartreuse and he mumbled something incoherent while turning his eyes to study his feet. Anastasia took up the slack. “His name is Istvan, he’s Hungarian, and we need to find a place, Tina.”
In response to being called by her proper name, Tina groaned and reached for a paper bag under the computer console. Sticking her hand inside, she withdrew a candy bar, unwrapped it and shoved it in her mouth. “I told you, my name is Maze,” she mumbled while ingesting it. “Call it a dippy nickname if you want, but I like it.”
Tina’s nickname had come about due to her being able to navigate through any program and hack through any firewall. She was also a severe chocoholic, couldn’t live without it, but if it kept her going, then no biggie, Harry thought. “Uh, Maze, we need you to find a place in Hungary,” he began. “It’s where we might find another lab. Can you do it?”
Maze chuckled and elbowed Jason. “Can I do it?” she asked in a mocking tone. “There’s nothing this girl can’t do and that’s a fact.”
After popping a few tasty chocolate morsels in her mouth, she set to work, muttering to herself as her fingers danced like lightning over the keyboard. “Okay, tell me where, Porky.”
“My name is Istvan,” the little man interrupted. This time a note of belligerence entered his voice, a first for him. He puffed out his chest and stood tall, all four feet of him. “I am not Porky or fatty or anything. I do not wish to be like this, but I am still person.”
Revolution Page 5
