Farrell, for his part, didn’t seem offended by her anger. “You made your point. And as an officer of the law, I have to ask. It’s my job.” He heaved in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“As for the victim, he won’t be jumping anyone else,” he groused and closed the file. “When you were in Nurmelev’s lab, did he ever mention any other clones or experiments similar to yours?”
Anastasia paused, her eyes seemingly delving into her own psyche. She seemed more introspective now, and her lips tightened as if trying to dredge up the necessary information. “No, I...don’t think he ever did. I still can’t remember a whole lot. If I think too hard about it, my head begins to hurt. If there’s something up here,” her ears twitched, “then it’s still hidden.”
Harry thought back to when he’d spoken with the mad scientist. Nurmelev had said there were only three successes, Anastasia, Doug, and Ivan. He’d seen the mistakes, twisted caricatures of humans, horribly distorted versions of reality. “We only found out about that bear guy, Ivan, later on,” he chimed in. “Doug didn’t remember, either.”
Farrell didn’t receive the news very well. A storm cloud formed on his face, and grimacing, he got up and whipped out his phone. “Hang on a second,” he said. “I have to clear the main lobby.” He strode out of the room, and returning a few minutes later, he waved at the pair to follow him.
“Come with me. The fewer people who see you the better,” he stated, motioning to Anastasia. When she glared at him, he hastily added, “I’m fine with the way you look. The rest of the world is going to take more time to process all this.”
Fifty shades of angry washed over Anastasia’s face, and she muttered something incomprehensible before asking, “Where are we going?”
“We’re going to take a ride.”
By the time they reached the lobby it was empty, and they moved out the rear exit. Farrell still drove his battered old Ford, the car he’d used the first time they’d met. After Harry and Anastasia piled in, he gunned the motor and took off into traffic.
At roughly seven in the morning, the morning rush hour hadn’t yet started. Farrell drove fast and hard in order to reach the highway, and soon they were speeding along at a merry clip.
Anastasia kept her head down. While her body was covered up, her head was exposed, and her ears, not to mention her fur and decidedly catlike although feminine features, immediately gave her away. “Where are you taking us?” she muttered. “And how long is this going to take?”
“We’re going to the Catskill Mountains,” the agent answered, his voice tight. “It should take about a couple of hours. Highway’s not in the best of condition, and the mountain roads are probably covered with snow. Why?”
A moan started in the back seat, slowly rising from a soft, intermittent sound to something higher in pitch, regular, and annoying. Farrell irritably said, “What in the hell is that? It sounds like an animal in heat.”
“Anastasia,” Harry said, hugging her to him. “She gets carsick.”
“Wonderful.”
The car shot forward and soon Anastasia began to moan louder, rocking back and forth and holding her stomach. Harry truly worried about her barfing, but figured, hey, regular people did it all the time. “Is everything okay back there?” Farrell queried after quickly looking over his shoulder. “I’ve got a couple of plastic bags if you’re going to—”
“Just shut up and keep driving,” Anastasia groaned, holding her stomach tightly.
After a fashion, the moans stopped and she slept. The interior of the car was warm and the rocking motion helped to lull Harry to a state of near unconsciousness.
Sleep didn’t come, not entirely. The memory of the cabin in the woods where unspeakable acts of human experimentation had gone on remained fresh in his mind. Nurmelev, a short, bald, and totally insane although brilliant scientist, had constructed a laboratory in a secret room below the surface. There, he’d created Anastasia, Doug, and Ivan, the bear-man, a towering menace that had died at Anastasia’s hands.
After a horrific battle and just as the end was near, the mad scientist—why did all scientists have to be classified as mad, anyway—had detonated a series of bombs that he’d rigged up.
The only reason Harry and Anastasia had survived was that they’d hidden in a secret room where the scientist kept the remains of his failed experiments. Nothing remained of the cabin, as he recalled, only charred timber and twisted steel. So why were they going...?
The sound of tires crunching over what sounded like hardened snow and gravel came through to his ears, and a draft of cold air startled him into wakefulness. “We’re here, kids, so get ready,” the flat voice of Farrell came. “It’s almost nine in the morning as we speak, and it’s time to search.”
Kids, once again, he has to say kids. This time, the agent used the plural form of the word. All the same, for once in his life Harry wished that anyone over the age of twenty would refer to him as an equal, at least in some ways. It seemed like it would not turn out to be the case.
As he looked out the window, a world of white greeted him. Snow lay thick upon the ground and covered the forest, which surrounded the remains of the cabin. He remembered the forest being unbelievably dense, with the trees packed so close together that not much light could penetrate. Back then, it had been summertime and greenery was the catchword of the day.
Now, only the neutral color of white dominated the area, and not a soul seemed to be around. Anastasia stirred, picked her head up, stretched, and quickly exited the car. Harry followed suit. “This is the place,” she said, craning her neck around to look. “Yeah, I remember being here.”
The agent had parked his car along the path near the woods, just a few yards away from the wreckage. Harry started to shiver. He hadn’t brought anything warm to wear, and the clothes he had on—a thick, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans—couldn’t keep out the cold.
Anastasia tested the air with her nose, sniffing it as a cat would in order to catch a scent of...what could be up here, anyway? Outside of some local residents who lived here year-round, the only other visitors during the winter were hunters and die-hard cross-country ski enthusiasts.
“You find anything unusual?” the agent queried while he watched her perform her smell-and-seek routine.
Anastasia’s ears twitched and she shook her head. “I got nothing. Just cold air and a faint smell of...” She broke off her sentence and sniffed the air again. “I thought I smelled ammonia, but maybe it was just a rabbit or dog passing through.” Her nose kept moving up and down rapidly, testing the air, though, and a perturbed look appeared on her face.
Harry observed the goings-on, and his own feelings of uneasiness began to grow. When Anastasia got worried, it usually meant something bad was going to happen. However, up here, right in the middle of nowhere with no evidence to speak of, he couldn’t figure out why she was acting this way.
Instead, he turned to the FBI agent. “So what’s the deal?” he enquired. “There’s nothing here.” He indicated the wreckage with a wave of his hand. “Didn’t your guys go over this before?”
“They did,” Farrell affirmed. Hands on hips, he surveyed the area with an air of disappointment, finally blowing out a deep breath. “But you never know, they might have missed something. Anastasia, can you remember anything other than what you’ve told us?”
She continued sniffing, her nostrils dilating and expanding rapidly. In a series of quick steps, she walked over to where a pile of charred lumber and metal bars lay partially covered with a blanket of snow. Standing there motionless with only her nose working overtime, she seemed to be concentrating. Finally, she shrugged and turned away.
“I can’t think of anything,” she said softly, shaking her head. “I try to remember things, remember who I was and why they captured me. I want to know why they did this to me, but whenever I do it just hurts.”
Traveling back in his memories to the not so long ago, Harry recalled the first time he�
�d met her. At headquarters, late at night, Farrell had brought in an ex-KGB doctor who’d defected to the American side, and he’d hypnotized Anastasia.
Under his spell, she remained as if in a light sleep and began to speak in flawless Russian. At the time, Farrell had considered her a spy as she had unimaginably perfect total recall, able to absorb and remember every single detail of anything she saw. While it seemed unbelievable, it turned out that she was a spy, although an unwilling one.
As for her past, that of being a prostitute, Harry had been shocked to the ends of the Earth when Nurmelev told him. On his end, though, he’d never mentioned it. It would have been too painful and he didn’t want to hurt her. You didn’t hurt those you loved, and she’d been hurt enough already.
“Hey!”
Someone shouted out the greeting and Harry whirled at the sound. Two men emerged from the forest. The first man was large, looked to be in his thirties, was wearing a parka over a suit, and had a pair of boots on. Was he an agent? It seemed so, as he called out, “Agent Farrell, I’m Agent Mathers.”
He carried a plastic bag in one hand and something in the other. When he lifted it up, it flashed in the morning sun. It was a badge—an FBI badge. The second man was Doctor Halsey, also wearing a parka and shivering in the cold, his pale skin turned red from the weather.
When he saw Anastasia, his eyes grew large and his face turned as white as the snow. The other man also showed surprise, and quickly, he tucked his badge away and put his hand inside his parka.
“Put your hand down, Mathers,” Farrell called out. “She’s with us.”
Immediately, Mathers did and nodded, although a wary expression remained on his face. However, if he was wary, then Halsey was plainly terrified, his mouth quivering along with his chins. “What...what is she doing here?” he squeaked out.
Questions, questions, there were lots of questions, chief of which was why Halsey was here in the first place. Harry thought he’d been put in charge, and now suddenly number two on the transgenics researching food chain had decided to put in a guest appearance.
Mathers walked over, proffered the bag, and Farrell took it. The younger agent scanned the area, his eyes constantly roving from tree to tree, and spoke softly. “We got here an hour ago. I’ve searched the perimeter, but couldn’t find anything. All I found was some bones.”
Through the transparent material, Harry saw bones, human and otherwise. “What are you doing here?” Farrell began by asking in a most conversational tone. “Who authorized this?”
Harry thought that the senior man had to be internally raging at someone getting here before he did, but if he was pissed off, he didn’t show it.
Mathers hesitated and waved his hand at Halsey. “Er, Doctor Halsey said that he was in charge. He had some notes and said we should search. So—”
“So you came up here without my authorization, is that it?” Farrell’s voice never rose above a conversational level, but his words indicated that someone was going to get their butt metaphorically kicked later on. “Fine, we’ll settle this when we get back to headquarters. What did you come up with?”
The other agent swept his hand across the area. “Hard to find anything in the snow,” Mathers stated, his breath coming out in puffs of icy air. “We came here before, in the summer, bagged and tagged everything we could find. If there is anything else, it’s buried under the wreckage, and we don’t want to alert the locals. As it is, someone might come by, and if I may, sir, I’d suggest we don’t stay up here too long.”
Farrell nodded his head. It seemed as though he considered this trip up here a waste of time as well.
“I’d like to take a look at those bones as soon as possible,” Halsey interjected, alternately looking cold, miserable, and scared at the sight of a cat-girl. For her part, Anastasia ignored him, choosing to stalk around, still testing for scents with her nose. She then bent over to examine the snow and waded out into it, sniffing around.
Harry glanced at her for a moment and then turned his attention back to the plump doctor. This called for the direct approach. Farrell seemed to want to wait in order to rip the doctor a new one. Harry didn’t. “You ordered this?” he asked Halsey. “Did Merton say it was okay?”
In a split second, the doctor’s fraidy-cat attitude vanished, replace by a smug and smarmy attitude. “He doesn’t know. You may think you know something about this line of research, but you’re in over your head. I studied at Vanderbilt, interned at the Mayo Clinic, and believe me, kid, you know nothing.”
Once more, he had to come out with a kid comment, but Harry decided to let it pass. A sense of betrayal ran through him, but he held his temper and listened to the other man rattle off his achievements. Halsey only stopped when he ran out of breath.
What a self-righteous jerk. Harry decided to drop the hammer. “If you’re so smart, did you manage to solve the matrix and turn Anastasia back into what she was when I first met her?”
Halsey’s superior attitude vanished, as did his smile. “No.”
“Who did?”
Reluctantly, the chubby man muttered, “You.”
Farrell then decided to step in. He’d been listening to the exchange, the expression on his face unreadable, but now an angry look supplanted the impassive one.
“You know, I was a little peeved before, but now I’m going to pull rank. You decided to go over my head, go over the Director’s head, and pull an agent off his regular duties just to see if you could get in on the action, is that it?”
Halsey started to protest, and the senior man’s voice continued to rise as he berated the doctor, calling him incompetent six ways from Sunday.
Harry decided it wasn’t worth getting pissed over. He’d already owned the doctor, and ownage was sweet. Still, some things had to be let go, and he walked off to join Anastasia. She stood at the edge of the forest line, sniffing the air. “Find anything?” he asked.
Not a word came from her at first, but the fur on the nape of her neck stood up, and her hackles went up slightly as well. “Something’s here,” she whispered and bent down to sniff at the snow. “Wait.”
With a sure hand, she dusted the top cover off and her search revealed a print—a paw print. Harry’s heart gave a quick jump. It looked like a cat’s paw print, but larger, as if it was mixed with a human one. There were toe marks—six of them—and as for the indentation, it was very shallow, as if the person was light in bodyweight.
Anastasia continued to check. After she’d pushed back more of the snow, he saw a few other prints. These ones were larger, circular, and if he didn’t know any better, they resembled prints made by something heavy, something large. He’d seen prints like those before in a textbook he’d read as a kid, and they reminded him of a rhinoceros’ hoof prints...
“Harry?”
He snapped out of his daze. “What is it?”
Anastasia’s face wore a worried expression, but abruptly her focus shifted and her eyes narrowed. A note of fear entered her voice. “We have to go back—now. I’m not sure what it is, but something’s here. Whatever it is, it’s not human.”
Uncertainty hung in the air. If the something wasn’t human, then what was it? He didn’t really want to find out, and she gently tugged on his arm once, and then with greater urgency. “It’s time to move, boyfriend.”
Slowly, they reversed course. Halfway back she stopped and crouched down, her nose sniffing the air wildly. “Yeah, I was right,” she said. “Those prints aren’t human. One of them looks like me, but the other...”
Her voice had gotten low and hoarse, trailing off to a whisper. The muscles in her body stood out tautly, ready for action. “It’s watching...no, wait, they’re watching us.”
Two people, there were two people? Harry didn’t know whether she was imagining things or not, but at the same time he had seen the foot or paw or whatever-it-was prints. Listening carefully, he heard nothing, not even the wind, and he smelled nothing. It was too cold.
How
ever, Anastasia was the expert in smells and scents, and he trusted her. A second later, she took his hand and they ran back, struggling through the thick snow to where the three other men stood.
“We’ve got company,” she announced in a tight voice and moved off a few steps, her eyes fixed on the forest and body tensed. In a flash, her claws sprang out, ready for whatever was lying in wait.
Farrell immediately drew his weapon, as did Mathers. Taking up shooter’s stances and swinging their pistols up into the firing position, silenced ruled until the junior man murmured, “What’ve we got?”
“Something that’s probably my height,” Anastasia said, “And something a lot bigger. They’re close.”
“Oh God,” the chubby doctor uttered, and it sounded like the pitiful squeak a mouse would make. “What’re we going to do?” he cried out, and Anastasia smacked him on the cheek. However, she did retract her claws.
“You’re going to shut your mouth, get down, and do nothing,” she hissed. “Are we clear on that?”
Halsey didn’t say another word, but he did as ordered and curled up in the fetal position, whimpering pitifully.
As they watched and waited, the tension grew. “C’mon, c’mon,” Farrell muttered, still sweeping the area with his pistol. Mathers wiped nervous sweat off his forehead, and Halsey continued to whimper, “This isn’t right, this isn’t right...”
Only Anastasia showed anger, her hair now standing up and a low, hoarse growl coming from her mouth. Her claws, razor sharp, glittered in the early morning sun. “C’mon, c’mon,” she said as if expecting the worst to happen.
As he looked on, mind half out of the action and half in, Harry tried not to be nervous. Bravery had to be observed here, but he was short, skinny, weak, and he knew it. He’d faced down monsters before, but this time two of them were lurking, and he didn’t know what to do.
His moment of action came a second later when two figures burst out of the woods, charging in their direction through the snow. The first was an all-black cat-girl, almost a carbon copy of Anastasia, and she half-jumped, half-leaped through the air. Even from a distance, he saw that her feet were more feline than human, and that accounted for the paw prints.
Rise of the Transgenics Page 5