Rise of the Transgenics

by J. S. Frankel

  “Holy God, there’s two of them!” Mathers yelled.

  He didn’t say much else, just pointed his pistol at the larger adversary and drew a bead on it. Getting a good look at the monstrosity, Harry immediately thought of the word nightmare, for it was something that only the word nightmare would describe. Perhaps six feet in length, it galloped toward them on all fours, throwing up great chunks of snow as it went.

  Built like a mini-rhino coupled with a boar, it had the head of a boar, but much narrower, and a ridge of bone ran from the crown straight down to its chin. Its mouth was a large, gaping maw full of nasty looking long and razor sharp teeth. A horn, long and thick, protruded from its forehead. Gray all over, it sported tremendous musculature and moved fast in spite of its bulk. Steaming snorts of rage spewed from its mouth as it charged through the snow.

  Screaming in terror, Halsey stood up in front of the charging rhino-boar and the monster tore right through him like tissue paper. His body literally got blown apart, and blood sprayed across the snow. The rhino-boar kept moving, and it moved fast, shaking off Halsey’s innards as it went.

  “Shoot them!” Farrell cried and he let loose, firing quickly at the rhino thing. Mathers shot at the other cat-girl, but she dropped to all fours and dodged the bullets effortlessly.

  The gap between attackers and prey quickly narrowed with Farrell still up in firing position. His gun clicked empty. He quickly ejected the spent clip, shoved in a fresh one, and continued the assault.

  “It’s not working!” Harry yelled.

  And it wasn’t. The bullets missed the cat-girl, and while some of them managed to penetrate the tough hide of the rhino thing, they didn’t slow him down much, if at all.

  “This isn’t working,” Harry yelled again. He thought the car wasn’t so far away. Could these creatures outrun a car? Considering how fast they moved, he’d never make it. “We have to leave!”

  “Not yet,” Anastasia hissed, and leapt out from her position to take on the other cat-girl.

  They clashed in the snow, hisses and yowls coming from both combatants. At first, it seemed as if they were evenly matched in strength. The black cat-girl took the offensive right away, and it seemed as though she’d had martial arts training, as her moves were precise and sharp.

  In contrast, Anastasia fought with a wilder, more animalistic yet somehow calculated defensive style. Back and forth they battled, and it looked as though technique would triumph, but Anastasia seemed to figure out the other cat-girl’s method of fighting. Flipping impossibly high in the air behind her opponent, she lashed out with her claws to the back of her opponent and knocked her ten feet away. “You want some more?” she yelled. “I’ve got a lot more waiting!”

  Slashes received or not, the black cat-girl didn’t seem to be badly hurt. In a series of back-flips, which demonstrated her flexibility, she moved a respectable distance away. She cocked her head to one side as if appraising their chances, and then whistled a name. “Piotr!”

  Piotr...it was a man’s name...a Russian man’s name. The cat-girl immediately followed up her call by yelling some other words, which Harry didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. He knew what they were.

  Then he saw her face as she turned to him, her grin wide and terrible, and her eyes roved over his body. Why, he didn’t know, but she stared at him not as someone to be killed, but as someone to be...captured.

  For its part, the rhino-boar also didn’t seem to want to kill anyone else. It had already savaged Halsey, but it kept darting back and forth between the agents. Harry also caught its gaze. Unlike its female friend, its beady, reddish piggy eyes seemed to radiate pure malice or pure evil or perhaps both, and the look was so strong that it fairly melted the snow. He wondered if it could talk.

  It soon answered the question by bellowing “Lyudmila” followed by other words, which were in the same language.

  Finally, the other girl charged towards Harry’s position. He picked up a split two-by-four as his weapon of choice, but Anastasia sped over in a flash and laid out the other cat-girl with a powerful right hook.

  Farrell glanced over at the action, and before anyone could yell a warning, the rhino-boar sprinted over in a shocking burst of speed, smashed into Mathers and literally ran right through him. The impact pulverized Mathers’ torso. His arms and legs hung in the air for a split second before they dropped like bloody logs to the snow. He didn’t even have time to cry out.

  A fine mist of blood sprayed in every direction as the monster continued on and smashed its paw onto Farrell’s gun hand. A snapping sound echoed sharply in the air, and Farrell cried out in pain. “Damn it!” he screamed, and fell to one knee.

  The monster continued its assault and backhanded-pawed Farrell across his face. It grinned, and the look on the creature’s face could only be described as demonic. “You,” it said. “You are nothing.” It then glanced over at Harry. “You are next.”

  The grin vanished and it blinked when Harry belted it across the face with the wooden plank, but more in surprise than in pain, and it promptly cut a sharp right over to the position of its fallen comrade. In a quick move, it scooped her up with one of its massive arms, and bounded into the forest.

  Anastasia, swearing quietly now and holding her arm, walked over to where the two men, one standing and one fallen, were. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Dropping the board, trembling from the adrenalin rush, Harry nodded. “Yeah, but I didn’t do anything. You did it all.”

  Examining her, he saw she’d been slashed and the cuts were deep, but a few seconds later, the cuts healed up and the marks vanished. One of the bonuses Anastasia had was the power of regeneration, in addition to her strength and speed. She shook her arm out and nodded, satisfied.

  “Hey, anyone want to get me up?” Farrell said weakly.

  Harry ran over and gently hoisted the agent to his feet. His right arm hung down at an awkward angle and the right side of his face had already started to swell. Getting hit by one of those paws had to be like being hit with a sledgehammer. However, Farrell said nothing about his condition. “Did you get those names?” he asked Anastasia.

  “Yeah, I did,” she remarked sourly. “They were speaking in Russian. They’re the same as I am.”

  Farrell’s mouth opened, but before he could utter a word his eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed. Since there was nothing anyone could do about the dead doctor and agent, Harry and Anastasia lugged Farrell’s semi-conscious form over to the car, placed him as gently as possible in the back seat, and Harry took the wheel.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as they got underway.

  Gunning the motor, Harry took off down the mountain road, heedless of the snow and ice, and after fishtailing his way onto the highway, he pushed the pedal to the metal. “I’m going to find a hospital first.”

  “Take me to...to Mercy General,” Farrell said weakly from the confines of the back seat. “It’s...one of ours.” He told them the address and then passed out.

  Putting the car in top gear, Harry set his course and even though the adrenalin rush had started to fade and lassitude emerged, he kept his mind focused on the job of driving.

  Anastasia remained silent. “Those things wanted to kill us,” she said.

  “No, they didn’t.” Harry shook his head as an awful thought entered his mind and it didn’t want to leave. “No, they only wanted to kill the agents. They wanted to capture me.”

  Chapter Four: A revelation

  Twenty nerve-wracking minutes later, they arrived at the hospital. Harry had attempted to keep his speed down, and frequently checked the rearview mirror to see if they were being followed. He saw nothing except other cars.

  The hospital was a rather small and unimposing structure set on the edge of a small forest. After pulling into the Emergency spot and motioning for Anastasia to crouch down, he said, “Try not to let them see you,” he beeped the horn twice and got out of the car, but left the motor running.
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br />   Farrell woke up long enough to heave his body painfully from the automobile and stagger out onto the cement. “Ask for...for Doctor Lindstrom,” he gasped out before collapsing.

  A guard appeared at the entrance and Harry yelled out, “Get Doctor Lindstrom!”

  The guard eyed Farrell and disappeared inside. A few seconds later, two orderlies pushing a gurney rushed out the door, picked up the fallen man and placed him on the gurney. One of the orderlies, a large man with cold gray eyes said, “We’ll take it from here, kid. Wait for someone to come out and take your statement.” They disappeared inside, leaving Harry alone.

  What was with the statement? “They would have to call me kid,” Harry muttered. Waiting for something to happen, he scanned the area. An extensive array of bushes surrounded the hospital, and a forest lay across the street, quiet and serene and covered in white.

  It all looked serene, but then again, the forest up in the Catskills had appeared the same at the outset, and monsters had been hiding there. He remained tense and jumped when Anastasia’s voice from behind him called out, “What’s going on?”

  “We have to...” he started to say.

  “Put your hands in the air!” someone yelled, and immediately, he clammed up. Two men in black rushed out, guns drawn.

  “Put your hands in the air!” one of them repeated. “Turn around, lean over the car, put your hands on it and spread your legs. Do it now!”

  “Hey guys, we’re on the same team,” Harry protested as he started to backpedal. Obviously, these guys hadn’t gotten the memo. They continued to advance and he continued to do the back-step shuffle.

  Anastasia poked her head out the window. “We’re trying to help.”

  Her words had some effect, as the agents stared first at her and then at each other. Taking that as his cue, Harry ran to the driver’s side of the car, gunned the engine, and took off. He needn’t have worried, though, as neither agent let off a shot. They simply stood and stared.

  “I guess being a circus sideshow attraction has its merits,” Anastasia commented wryly from the passenger seat. She did, however, crouch down to dashboard level.

  “You’re not a freak, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  Reactions to the different weren’t unusual, Harry thought as he drove down the road. Still, his girlfriend wasn’t a freak, not in his eyes. Anastasia raised her head long enough to lean over and plant a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks.”

  She then slumped down in the seat and focused her eyes on the blankness of the dashboard. “Will Farrell be okay?”

  Harry answered, “I think so, but we’ve got other problems. The rest of the agency doesn’t know about us, or about you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “They were gonna arrest me, and those two things up there wanted to capture me!”

  “I think they were after me,” Anastasia pointed out and a thoughtful look came over her face. “Still...you might be right about those two wanting to catch you. They could have wasted you right away, but only that other cat-girl wanted to take me on. Her friend didn’t seem like he wanted any of my action. I wonder why.”

  Harry had been wondering the same thing. That rhino-boar thing—Piotr—seemed pretty much unstoppable. Yet he hadn’t attacked Anastasia at all. His words, though—you are next—remained fresh in Harry’s mind, and he wondered what their ultimate plan was.

  He stepped on the gas and the car shot forward, but he kept his speed down to an acceptable level. Getting pulled over was not on the menu. “Right now we’ve got to keep searching. I’ll call in later on.”

  Driving back to the city, he wondered once more if the two Russians were somehow trailing them. Anastasia was obviously thinking the same thing when she asked, “Are we going back to headquarters?”

  It was a good question, one that he couldn’t answer. After the incident at the hospital, Harry had the feeling that the agency wasn’t about to welcome him or his girlfriend with open arms. He drove along, keeping his speed down, and wondered what to do. The first option meant going back to home base, telling everyone what they knew, but option B...what was option B?

  “How about we listen to some music?” Anastasia asked and switched on the radio.

  “Good idea.”

  Music always helped to calm a person down, but this radio was old and not in the best of condition, and it filled the car with static at first. As it cleared, the hard, jangling sounds of a heavy metal song filled the air, and Harry’s ears tightened painfully. He didn’t care for the genre. Apparently, his girlfriend didn’t care for it, either, and she quickly changed the station to something a little slower.

  “That’s better,” she murmured.

  Soon, the sounds of a soft ballad from a local station came through, and Harry began to relax, if only a little. His moment of peace, though, was interrupted by the high, strident voice of an announcer.

  “We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The police have discovered the bodies of two men in the Catskill Mountains, near Esopus Creek. Dylan Halsey and Carleton Mathers, both employed by the FBI, were discovered a short time ago, severely mangled, and the culprits are still at large...”

  Oh crap, Harry thought. How did they know? “What in the hell...?”

  “Quiet!” Anastasia commanded. “We have to listen to this.”

  “Witnesses say that the suspect was a teenager named Harry Goldman, age eighteen,” the announcer continued. “He was accompanied by a female accomplice, name and description unknown. They are believed to be in New York City...”

  The announcer proceeded to give out Harry’s description, a very accurate one. In a sudden burst of rage, Anastasia punched the radio, smashing it and cutting off all sound.

  Harry started to sweat, and it wasn’t because the heater was on. “Well, I guess going back to headquarters is out of the question, but how did they know it was us?” he began, trying to think straight. “There weren’t any witnesses—”

  “Yeah, there were,” Anastasia interrupted. “Those two things that attacked us, they were the witnesses. They want the authorities to bring us in. And we were just seen at the hospital.”

  In that moment, Harry realized he’d been fooling himself. On the one hand, the rest of the FBI hadn’t been told of his involvement with the program. In the eyes of the average agent, he was a fugitive, and God knew what they thought of Anastasia.

  On the other hand, he also knew that they couldn’t be taken in. If they were caught and taken to a jail, a local jail with relatively poor security, then that would automatically make them an easy target. While he wasn’t sure if they wanted his girlfriend, he was certain that they wanted him.

  Anastasia reached over and touched his hand, jolting him out of his reverie. “We can’t let them get us. The FBI knows that we didn’t do it.”

  “No...they don’t,” he answered, grimly thinking about his chances in a regular prison, if it came to that. Oh, who was he kidding? In a jail cell with a bunch of hard cases, he had two chances—slim and none.

  Still, there was only one way to find out where he stood. Risk or no risk of being seen, he had to take a chance. Taking an off-ramp, he drove to a self-service gas station and spotted a payphone. “Stay down,” he said.

  He got out of the car, kept his head down, and hunched his shoulders as he walked to the phone. He dug a few quarters out of his pocket, fed them into the slot, and dialed FBI headquarters. Immediately, a secretary’s voice came on the line, he gave his name, and she transferred the call to Merton. The Director sounded concerned. “Where are you?” he asked. “You’ve got to come in.”

  “You set us up!” Harry yelled and then caught himself. A few people who’d been filling up their cars stared at him and he turned away, hiding his head with one arm. “You set us up,” he whispered harshly. “We had to take Farrell to the hospital, and the agents there wanted to arrest us. What kind of game are you playing? If you are playing one, then I’m not having any fun.”

  “It’
s no game,” the answer came. “Outside of you, me and Farrell, and a couple of others, no one else knows your involvement with the agency. Apparently, a news station got a call from a woman with a faint accent.”

  Lyudmila, it had to be her, Harry thought. “Let me guess, she gave a perfect description of me,” he said, keeping the sarcasm to a minimum.

  The answer came instantly, and if the Director was angry, it didn’t show in his voice. He sounded totally matter of fact. “She did. And five minutes after we received a call from the local police and the news station, Farrell contacted us and told us to call off the agents.”

  Harry’s first thought was whether the police would be called off as well, but instead, he asked, “How’s Agent Farrell?”

  “He’s got a broken arm and lacerations, but he’ll make it.”

  Great, he survived the attack. Harry thought quickly and ran through his list of options once more. Really, there weren’t many, not since he’d found out the police were looking for him. “I’m sorry about the two other men,” he started to say. “They didn’t know about—”

  “I know all about them,” Merton interrupted, and this time his anger came through clearly over the connection. “If we find out who did this, they won’t last a day.”

  “Good luck on that,” countered Harry.

  Merton’s voice rose in anger. “You don’t know how much firepower we can bring, son.”

  “Sir, you don’t have any idea of what kind of damage they can do. One of them’s a cat-girl like Anastasia, and the other is, I don’t know, like some kind of rhino. I mean, I saw Anastasia fight them. She might be able to take the cat-girl, but against that other monster, no way.”

  “Come in. We’ll protect you.”

  “Have you told the police about me or Anastasia?”

  There was a minute’s pause and then...”No. We have to keep this quiet.”

  Oh, this was too much! First, the FBI thought he was guilty, and now the police. And no one could know that there were transgenic beings running around or else the public would panic. The people were going to panic anyway, he figured. “Come in,” the Director repeated.