by Jack Truxton
“You should have just done your job, boy,” Brenton spat at me as if he was daring me to punch his lights out. “You’ve done so much damage here, but I fix problems.” The fact that he didn’t keel over just from the shouting was amazing, as he tried to suck in a breath of air between each one.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty good at that too,” I shot back. “Annie, stay here, Ny and I will—”
“No!” Annie shrieked, her tail falling to curl between her legs. She had her hands on my shoulders. “He’ll hurt you, Jake! You don’t know what he is! The reason he’s so sick! He’s a monster!”
Nyala’s eyes flashed over at Annie for answers, but I didn’t need to. It only took a moment to realize what she was talking about. See, when you muck with the genetic code of any living creature too much, you can cause instabilities, unexpected health problems, all manner of issues. Most standardized genemods are safe enough, sure, but they weren’t that big a deal. But the kind of bleeding-edge experimental stuff, true human enhancement like what accidentally happened safely to me, well, that usually played havoc with the body in exchange for incredible power.
You’d wind up in much the same state as Brenton was.
That’s when Brenton depressed a hidden trigger on his attaché case. Through the mesh around the tubes leading out, a thick liquid pumped through, and the wheeze was gone. As his muscles tightened and his bones audibly cracked, he twisted and shifted from little old man to a literal monster of corded muscle, fangs and claws of twisted bone erupting from his jaws and fingers as his clothing shredded. He grew swollen as his skin stretched and strained under the new growth, turning bright red as it strained to hold his new mass in. But that growth wasn’t even. It was twisted, misshapen, accompanied by uneven tufts of hair erupting from his skin, his one good eye bulging in the socket hard enough to pop the monocle off of his face.
The scream of pain and rage that rippled through Brenton pierced the shocked silence, one of his twisted hands still holding onto the suitcase as more fluid pumped away. With his jacket and shirt in rags, it was clear that the tubes were connected directly into his side through metal connectors driven right into his flesh.
As the transformation slowed, never quite complete as his body continued to bulge and twist, Monster-Brenton growled as he reared back to charge. “Now then, Jacob, let’s clean up your mistake.”
23
Before I could even push off to try to head off the rampaging, mutated man that was Annie’s former master, Nyala produced Romine’s pistol from, well, somewhere and simply shot him, the boom echoing in the confined space of the office. The bullet slammed into Brenton’s shoulder, the one that had blown up to the size of a watermelon, and regardless of the crazy mods the old monster was on, the shot ripped through skin and muscle with a spray of blood and gore. The kinetic force blunted his charge, his torso twisting back from the impact, but it didn’t stop him entirely.
As Brenton roared in a combination of rage and pain, Annie flinched back from him. I hopped onto the desk and kicked off of it, determined to take advantage of the opening Nyala’s shot had bought me.
Leaping through the air, I crashed into the reeling Brenton with a kick right in the center of mass, driving him back further on his heels. The talons that had ripped out of the old man’s shoes clenched down, curling into the floor and tearing up both shag carpet and the hardwood beneath it. His backward slide arrested, Brenton’s torso twisted back forward, and I did the smart thing, kicking off and away from him as his free hand ripped through the space where I had been a moment before.
“Something happened to you down there, didn’t it, Jacob?” he snarled, seeming to ignore both the gunshot and the kick despite the blood dribbling down his arm. “And yet you don’t share my condition.”
Unlike your usual villain from an action vid, Brenton had mastered the art of talking and fighting at the same time. As he pontificated, the twisted thing pressed forward, lashing out with his claws and the briefcase itself, using it as a club. Despite the massive power that rippled through Brenton’s frame, the deformities brought on by his genemods made his attacks slower and his advance off-balance. And that was just enough for me to keep out of his reach.
Considering just one errant backhand from him turned one of the office chairs into kindling, I was glad he hadn’t actually tagged me. The problem was that all I could do was dodge away from the wild frenzy of attacks, and in the confines of the office, Nyala couldn’t get a clear shot off, if that would even help. The first shot didn’t seem to slow him down much.
No, what I needed to do was get to the case or the tubes. I had no idea just what all was flowing through Brenton’s system, but he didn’t go all Monster Mash until the juice started flowing.
“Nyala, get Annie and get the hell out of here!” I shouted as I was forced back to the desk.
Brenton roared in response, bringing both hands up over his head to crush my head like a watermelon. “You youngsters are always thinking with what’s between your legs instead of your brains!” Fortunately, my heightened reflexes and cat-like instincts made me skilled in the art of Not Being There. I rolled left as Brenton smashed through the thick oak tabletop like it was made of kindling. “You care about a machine just because it looks pretty and gives you a good lay, eh?”
As Annie’s tearful cries kept echoing in my ears, I hoped that Nyala was getting her to safety. I didn’t blame Annie for breaking down. She not only had the man responsible for her death sentence reappear in her life, but he was a true monster, one that was going to kill her himself.
At least Brenton was still focused purely on me because keeping the two Kats safe was my number one priority. And I was going to stop him. I just had to find an opening. To keep the monster paying attention to me, I kicked the other guest chair into his chest. He didn’t even wince as it shattered into a million pieces from the force of the impact.
“Yeah, the problem with dinosaurs like you is that you can’t open your mind to new things,” I shot back as pieces of broken chair rained down around him. “You can’t accept that we made life, that we played God, and we’ve got to deal with that responsibility.”
The giant put on a burst of speed, using sheer power to overcome his misshapen body, and I just barely ducked his huge swipe as his claws tore through the glass bookshelves, scattering glittering shrapnel everywhere.
“You can argue your philosophy with whatever waits for you in the afterlife, Jacob,” Brenton snarled even as I came up from the floor with a short, sharp uppercut into his gut. Though I swore I felt something important and gooey in his stomach give under my strength, he didn’t seem to feel it. “And I believe we’re at the end of this farce. Nowhere left to run.”
He wasn’t exactly wrong as I was cut off from the rest of the room by his immense bulk, but that didn’t mean I was out of options. “I think you’re going to find we’re just starting,” I snapped back, putting on a cocky grin just to piss him off that much more.
A dozen messages were blinking in my smartglasses, but I was a bit too busy to read them. Instead, I fired off a quick ‘Shoot Johnson if he gets out’ message to all the guards on duty as Brenton moved in for the kill, thrusting his free hand forward, careful to keep the case and tubes out of my reach.
I was faster by a country mile, but in the confined space of the corner, it was far too close for comfort. As in it was so close that Brenton’s claws skimmed my chest as I twisted to the left, toward the side that had his tubes in it. The razor-sharp edges ripped clean through the reinforced fabric like it wasn’t there, slicing four lines of burning hot agony across my torso. Thank God they weren’t deep, but they still bled freely and hurt like a bitch.
But the important thing was that Brenton had played into my hands. As I slipped by his thrust, I grabbed his arm from the side and yanked back, pulling him forward along the line of his attack. His own momentum was compounded by the force of my pull, throwing him way off-balance. Grunting with effort, I kept hi
s claws hurtling towards the wall. When they hit, they sunk right through wood and drywall to plunge into the structural beam in the corner of the room.
It wouldn’t hold him for long, but for that second, Brenton was trapped, his good eye widening with surprise as he tottered forward, barely able to keep his balance with his arm trapped.
Ignoring the fire in my chest, I kept twisting, turning my dodge into a spin as I rolled to Brenton’s side. Though he held the case protectively back, his long, twisted arm keeping it out of easy reach, doing so left the tubes plunging into his side wide open. As I reached for them, I was far enough out of Brenton’s shadow to catch a sidelong glimpse of Nyala trying to pull a kicking and mewling Annie out the front door.
Good, they’d get away, that much I was sure of. That’s what I thought anyway as I caught the metal-wrapped tubes in my right hand, planting my feet as I squeezed and pulled.
Brenton seized up, the sudden contraction of his immense muscles tearing his claws free in one go as he let out a terrible roar of pure agony. While the tubing didn’t tear or pull free in one tug, blood welled up around the metal ports they were connected to as the plate itself threatened to tear free from his flesh. Sucking in a quick breath, I twined the tubes in my hand and got ready to yank again.
But the monster wasn’t done yet. Somehow overcoming his pain, Brenton roared like an animal, swatting at me with a wild swing of the case itself. While maintaining my grip as best I could, I let my body go limp and dropped out of the direct line of the attack.
It was a ballsy move that let me maintain my grip on him, and better still, instead of the thing blasting me dead-on in the noggin, my quick thinking turned it into a grazing blow across the tip of my chin. That was still enough to rock my head sideways as the corner of the case tore an awful cut in my jaw and rung my bell but good.
Still, through all that, I kept a death grip on the tubes, using them to keep me standing despite Brenton’s wild strike. As I tried to steady myself, Brenton swung his good eye around to glare death at me, his claw cocked back and ready to impale me.
He might have too if a cast iron frying pan hadn’t flown through the air to crash into the side of his head.
“No!” Annie roared despite the sobs still trying to clog her throat, more a lioness than a cute little Ragdoll. “I won’t let you hurt him!” As Brenton’s head turned back from the shot, he oriented on the nurse Kat who was quivering with fury even as the tears kept rolling down her reddened cheeks while Nyala picked herself up from where Annie had somehow thrown her off of her. “I won’t let myself be afraid of you anymore!”
“You don’t have to be afraid, Annie,” Brenton snarled, too caught up in the moment to notice me. “You just have to comply.” He raised the case up in front of himself and fingered a different switch on the grip. A panel on the front of the thing fell away, revealing a small barrel, and then a burst of purple dust streamed out like a very colorful flamethrower.
Control pheromones … enough of an overdose that it would take any normal Wonder Kats straight to paralysis and likely cardiac arrest.
I don’t know which of us started laughing first, whether it was me, Annie, or Nyala, but within a second, we all were. Brenton’s eye bulged as he lowered the case, shock and confusion playing out over his mutated face. “What … what is this? What did you do, Jacob?”
It was Nyala who answered, fanning the dust out of her face as she got to one knee, one hand still clenched around the grip of Romine’s pistol. “Whiskers, how stupid can you be? He freed us!” Annie nodded vehemently, her tail poofed as she readied to pounce her tormentor, as Nyala raised the pistol toward the still-shocked Brenton. “The case, Jake!”
I knew what she meant the moment I saw her aim tick up and left slightly. I let go of the tubes and kicked off Brenton’s side the split-second Nyala pulled the trigger. Her shot was perfect, blowing right through the wrist that was still gripped right to the briefcase’s handle, tearing through muscle, bone, and tendon. I twisted through the air, his hand going limp and dropping the case just as I passed under it. Snatching it with both hands, I sailed just out of Brenton’s reach, hitting the ground at the limit of the tubes.
“You madman!” Brenton roared, his eye flashing towards me, fear and shock replacing the absolute fury. “You’ll doom us all!” I ignored his insanity, of course, and he was thankfully cut off as Annie crashed into him, hissing, crying, and pummeling him with frenzied punches and slaps.
Screaming back at her, Brenton reared back a claw, about to tear into Annie during her frenzy. No way in hell was that going to happen, so I gave one massive yank on the briefcase. The tubes snapped taut again, pulling so hard on the metal plate that I thought they might actually come loose this time. While they didn’t, the tremendous internal strain as tissue ripped and more blood dribbled around the plate sent a shudder of agony through Brenton, his slash thrown off by a good foot from piercing Annie’s side.
But even with all my strength, the case wasn’t pulling free. Whoever did all this mod work on Brenton must have bonded the tubing and plates directly to his bones, and even as strong as I was now, I couldn’t rip the bones clean out of his body. As I pulled hard to keep him off balance, my fingers searched desperately for a catch, anything to open the case itself up, but every switch on the handle I had seen him press did jack shit. It had to be biometrically or gene locked, and I didn’t have the genetic code of an old bastard of a mutant.
I wasn’t licked yet. Yanking hard one more time as Annie kept beating on him while staying ahead of his claws, I looked over at Nyala. The business Kat was trying to line up another clean shot on some vital spot, something hard to do with both Annie and me struggling with the beast.
“The tubes! Shoot the tubes!” I shouted as my muscles strained, pulling the tubes as taut and straight as I could. The case itself was certainly bullet-proof, but even with their metal sheaths protecting them from tearing, a bullet would certainly tear through them. Of course, that was also asking Nyala to hit a thin moving target at ten paces with a weapon she had shot twice in total.
“Whiskers, don’t ask me to do the impossible, Jake.” Still, Nyala took a deep breath and nodded, golden eyes squinting as she focused on the shot, but before she could squeeze the trigger, another voice called out from above, muffled by the drop panels.
“Command confirmed,” the feminine voice said, punctuated by the surprisingly loud sound of a bowstring. The ceiling panel just a little to one side of Brenton, right where the tubes were stretched out, blew outward as a broad-headed arrow rocketed downward, completely unphased by the tile. With pinpoint accuracy, a neat trick because whoever fired it shouldn’t have been able to see what they were aiming at, the spinning projectile tore into the two tubes, slicing right through the top one like butter and gouging a tear into the second before burying itself up to the fletching in the floor.
With all my strength and weight still on it, the other tube tore along the rip, sending me falling backward clutching the case to my chest. Viscous green goo spurt from one tube while thick, red blood pulsed from the other, and Brenton, well, his entire body spasmed wildly, his wheezing and gasping for air coming back on strong as his body seemed to deflate like a popped balloon. The reversion was almost as sudden as when he activated the genemod, and a moment later, he was a shriveled old man again, half-naked and bleeding badly from his injuries, though the ports in his side must have had a safeguard to close up in case of a breach, the leaking stopping in mere moments.
But even as Annie fell to her knees, panting from exertion next to her old master and Nyala ran to her side, my attention was more on the shadowy figure that I could just make out through the hole in the ceiling, especially when it burst through that hole, tearing away what was left of the ceiling tile in the process.
24
I was on my feet in the blink of an eye, still high on adrenaline, holding the briefcase tight in case I needed it as a weapon. Nyala switched from support to defense,
her pistol snapping up to track our newest guest, while Annie rubbed at her tears as she snatched up the black iron pan that had wound up next to her. As the cloud of dust and debris from the ceiling settled, the figure straightened up from a feline crouch, making no attempt to hide further or attack any of us.
And it was immediately apparent that standing before us was another Wonder Kat, but she was unlike any I had ever seen. She stood up rod-straight with the perfect posture of a dancer or an acrobat but wasn’t much more than five feet tall if you didn’t count the poised, alert ears on top of her head. Speaking of those ears, they were the color of dark chocolate, matching the fur of her swishing tail and the straight-banged bob cut of hair on her head. If I was any judge of breeds, and I was, I pegged her for a Burmese.
As with every Kat, she had that perfectly designed beauty, but unlike most of them, her physique was that of a gymnast, with perfectly delineated muscle, narrow hips, and broad shoulders. Somewhat counter to that image, though, was her rather sizable breasts straining against her skin-tight black bodysuit that left absolutely nothing to the imagination, the only visible markings being a shimmering pattern across her breasts that, when viewed at just the right angle, became the Katsukami Biodesigns logo. Tied around her neck and piled about her shoulders was a dark grey scarf … or maybe it was some kind of hooded poncho. It was hard to tell, as it shimmered like it was under a mild distortion field.
Her green eyes regarded the three of us coolly before locking onto me, her grip still tight on an extensively modified compound bow, a quiver of arrows seemingly bonded to the back of her suit through a feat of materials science I couldn’t grasp. Despite everything that seemed strange and different about this Kat, there was something about her, something in the delicate features of her golden skin, that called out to me, that I knew this woman, or at least her design.