Rise of the Transgenics

by J. S. Frankel

  “Hey! What are you doin’ here?”

  The voice belonged to a very large man with dirt covering his face. Harry couldn’t tell if the man was black or white. He just heard the anger echo over the area and said to Anastasia, “I think this is where we get off.”

  Good thing, too, as the group gave a cry of rage, picked up some sharp sticks and metal pipes, and charged their position. They didn’t sound quite like animals, but on the other hand, they didn’t sound quite human, either.

  “Run!” Anastasia yelled.

  “I hear you!” he gasped out.

  Grabbing her hand, he took off as fast as possible and they hastily beat a retreat up the stairs with the mob—the second mob—hot on their heels.

  Fate or perhaps bad luck decided to play its hand, as Harry tripped and fell on the stairs, and that cost them both precious seconds. “Get up,” Anastasia urged.

  She pulled him to his feet, and they got as far as the door when he felt something heavy and hard land on his head. For the second time in less than a day, he knew he was going down for the count and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Anastasia falling as well.

  Chapter Nine: Lynch Mob—Part Two

  As he came to, slowly, and with a great deal of pain scorching the back of his skull, Harry’s first thought was that getting captured twice in the space of a few hours had to be some sort of record. He didn’t see it as something to be overly proud of.

  As for his second thought, he wondered if he’d live to see the next sunrise. Thinking it over, he had severe doubts.

  He found himself in a standing position with his hands lashed to a pipe by thick ropes. The pipe was old, rusty, and a foul smell came from it, making him long for a bucket of cold water and a bar of soap.

  Pain lanced through his head every time he blinked, and when he shook it, spatters of blood hit the floor. Hearing a moan to his left, he twisted his neck around and saw Anastasia trussed up in the same manner. “Hey, are you awake?” he asked.

  “I am now,” she answered, her voice thick with anger. “What hit us?”

  “This,” someone said in a deep voice and the owner of the voice stepped out of the gloom holding onto a pipe. Three feet long, it was covered in blood—theirs.

  The speaker had to stand at least six-five and seemed almost as wide. Wearing only a large trench coat covering a tattered pair of too-small jeans and ripped up boots, the man sported a torn cowboy hat on his head. “Don’t move,” he said, underscoring the obvious.

  Maybe in his forties, he had no eyebrows, and when he took off his hat to wipe his head, Harry noticed he was bald and that the scalp and face were very pale, as were his hands, the skin almost translucent. Living down here as he and the others did had leached out any pigmentation from his body.

  “What’s going on here?” Harry asked.

  A laugh without any humor behind it greeted his question. “What’s going on,” the man said, sticking his face closer and shoving the pipe under Harry’s chin, “is that you and this cat-chick have invaded our personal space. I’ve seen some pretty strange things down here, but never nothing like that. What in the hell is she?”

  Anastasia growled, shook her head, and tried to wriggle free, but couldn’t make much progress although she strained against her bonds. Heaving in deep breaths, she glared murderously at the leader. “I’m a girl, you moron, just a furry one.”

  In an attempt to shed some light, Harry answered in a polite tone, “She’s a transgenic, a cross between a cat and a girl. Someone made her that way. And you have a nice place here, so if we’re in the way, we’d be happy to leave.” Abruptly he stopped speaking, aware of how stupid his statement must have sounded.

  The other under-surface dwellers heard the exchange and let out a laugh in unison. “City boy thinks he’s gonna leave?” one of them called out.

  “He ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said another, darker voice from below.

  More of the members added their input, basically, saying that there was no point in thinking about leaving, for where would they go?

  Wonderful, Harry thought, they’d already been chased by one lynch mob, and this group was no better. “You guys know that the authorities are looking for us.”

  The bald leader received the news without batting an eye and pushed the pipe up an inch higher. “Is that so? What’d you guys do, rob a pet store?”

  His joke caused another round of laughter to erupt. When it died down, Harry said, feeling the strain in his neck, “Two others, sort of like her,” he nodded at Anastasia, “killed some FBI agents and the police think we did it.”

  “Did you?”

  Sarcasm seemed to be the bald man’s forte, and Harry bit his tongue in order to keep from spouting off a smartass answer. It was frustrating, though, but these guys had the numbers and the weapons, so for now they called the shots. And right now, his neck was killing him.

  “No,” he answered, “we didn’t. But two others did, and if you’re lucky they won’t show up here. And could you please take that pipe off me?”

  The bald man’s expression didn’t change, but he did pull the pipe away from Harry’s jaw and rubbed his own jaw with it, as if figuring out the pros and cons of answering. In the end, he simply shook his head.

  “Well, considerin’ we don’t get out much, I’m not sure I care. I can see, though,” and he pointed at Anastasia, “that someone in a zoo might want their pet kitty back.” Another chuckle came from him, but as before, there was no humor in his voice.

  “Don’t call me that,” she growled.

  Her threat didn’t faze the large man at all. Instead, he stopped his temporary bout of laughter and clobbered her across the temples with the pipe. More blood spurted out and her head sagged down. “That’s how you take care of invaders,” he said.

  “You bastard,” Harry ground out. “What was that for?”

  “That’s for her being a freak,” the bald man said. “She looks like she can take it. Can you?”

  No, Harry knew for a fact that he couldn’t. A shot like that would probably cave his head in. As he looked at his girlfriend, the wound to her head had already started to heal. Reluctantly, he shifted his attention to his chief captor, and a sense of curiosity overtook him. “How did all of you get here?” If he was going to meet the same fate, at least he’d know the whys of it all.

  The man turned to him, a mean look on his face. A second later, though, it disappeared, as if he’d decide there was no imminent threat. Instead, a more introspective look took its place. When he spoke, it came out in a very matter-of-fact way, without pity or anger. “How’d we get here? The city, Mr. Visitor, it left us here. See,” he swept his hand around to indicate the chamber, “When you’re downsized in a job, you got nowhere else to go.”

  A cough came from deep in his lungs and he gasped out, “Health care,” and spat out a large wad of phlegm when uttering those two words, “It’s only good if you got money to begin with, even a little.”

  After taking in a deep breath, he resumed his story. “We didn’t. So when we didn’t, when the unemployment benefits ran out, we wandered the streets, same as all the other homeless.”

  “But it’s tougher up there than it is down here,” another man piped up and walked over to give his input. Of indeterminate age, he wore stained and filthy sweatpants, an equally filthy sweatshirt, and had only a few loose teeth flopping around in swollen gums. “If you’re too old, undereducated, drunk, drugged up, or whatever else, you got no chance of getting a job in this economy.”

  “So you end up walkin’ the streets,” a man’s voice called out from below. He sounded quite a bit older than the others. “And if you don’t freeze to death up top, someone’ll either knife you or kill you for your clothes. You got a piece of bread and they’ll take that, too. Down here, everyone leaves us alone.”

  Harry thought back to how the lynch mob up top had acted. Not like people, no, more like primitives. Fear made people think in only the simplest, most conc
rete black and white terms. Kill the different. Terminate the unknown. And right now, he took a look at all the denizens of the depths that had come up to gawk at him and Anastasia—mainly at her.

  “We all got stories to tell you, kid,” one of them, a woman, said in a lazy Southern drawl as she mounted the steps.

  “You tell ‘em, Sally,” the almost toothless man said.

  As she drew closer, she pulled the hood that had shielded her head to reveal her face. Perhaps in her thirties, she had a long mane of filth-encrusted hair and features darkened by soot and grime. The only thing that stood out was her eyes, a luminous blue.

  “Y’all want mine? I ran from some people down south who wanted to kill me. I came to New York, oh, maybe two years ago. Couldn’t find work, got kicked out of my apartment, so when you got nothing, you drop lower and lower. I ended up down here. It’s not much, but no one comes here and no one bothers us.”

  Right in front of him, he saw decay, smelled the hopelessness of their lives, and wondered why no one would bother helping out. Their words hit home—no one cared, and if no one cared, then what was a person to do? He’d been lucky his whole life, lucky in the sense that he’d had parents who’d loved him and done for him. He’d also been born with a first-class mind, and even though he’d never had many friends, at the very least he hadn’t ended up alone and homeless. Had his situation been any different, how would his life have been different?

  There were so many variables to think about, how one person could end up a millionaire and another, a pauper. Still, the reality of his situation hit home. These people were not in a philosophical mood to debate the what-ifs in life.

  Sizing them up, Harry wondered if they’d gone the cannibal route. “Um, how do you guys get food? I mean—”

  “Y’mean, do we eat each other?” another man chortled. He seemed to find the prospect more than a little amusing, as did the rest of the group. They joined in the laughter, and Harry couldn’t tell if they thought he’d been joking or not. He did look around for bones or corpses, but couldn’t find any. On the other hand, in a place like this who would look?

  “No, ain’t nobody got time for that,” the woman said. “We go up topside when the time is right and do that dumpster-diving thing. We search, we scavenge. That’s what we do best, and we’ve managed to find places that always got lots of eats there if you know where to find them.”

  “And speaking of finding,” the almost toothless man said with a throaty laugh which dissolved into a hacking cough. He pounded his skinny chest and hawked out a wad of something black and evil. “Sorry about that,” he apologized. “Bad air and bad lungs and...”

  His voice tailed away as his train of thought temporarily moved in a different direction, that of bad health, but then his eyes focused and he nodded. “Oh yeah, about us, guess where you are? This is one of the abandoned subway tunnels the city built a long time ago. I can’t remember the name, been down here so long.” He looked at the group members. “Anyone know?”

  “No,” the collective answer came.

  After giving another slight cough, he nodded. “They don’t know, and I tell ya, I don’t care, either. These chambers are all around us, some of them bigger and even deeper. There are other people livin’ down here, you know? We’ve all heard stories about them doin’ some real bad things to those people who come down and snoop around.”

  “Hasn’t anyone from the Water Works Department ever come here?” Harry asked in a desperate attempt to buy more time.

  His question earned him another chuckle from the group and the dentally challenged man waved off the question like an elephant shooing a fly away with its tail. “Sometimes people from the sewer department come down here, so we just douse the fire and hide. They’re not gonna bother with the likes of us. They don’t care.” He quickly glanced at the rest of the people huddled around the fire and for a second, a note of hopelessness entered his voice. “No one does.”

  Harry tried to find a measure of compassion for these people, and under any other circumstances he would have. However, with his freedom and life on the line, he really couldn’t spare any. Finally, he came out with, “Listen, my girlfriend and I were just trying to get away from the same people you hate up on the surface.”

  The crowd around him edged in closer and a sense of desperation combined with fear took hold. “The police said that we killed some federal agents. That means they’re searching for us, and—”

  “And they’re not going to look down here,” the bald leader cut him off, tapping the edge of the pipe on the palm of his meaty hand. “I thought we told you that.”

  “There are monsters up there!” Harry exclaimed. “Didn’t any of you go up top and listen to the radio—”

  A smack across his cheek, courtesy of the leader, cut him off. “Kid, in case you haven’t figured it out, we don’t got a radio here. No TV, no radio, and no computer, either. Even if we did, there’s no way to get any reception. We’re deep, you understand me—deep. All we got is each other, and that’s more than what most got up there.”

  With a massive forefinger, he pointed to the ceiling. “And if you wanna talk about monsters, little Miss Kitty tied to that pipe isn’t something that you see every day.”

  Oh, you don’t want to call her that, Harry thought. “Uh, mister, that’s really not a good idea,” he said.

  The bald man poked him hard on the shoulder. “Kid, lemme make this clear to you. You’re in no friggin’ position to say anything. Get this straight. This is our turf. You invaded it. No one’s gonna look for you, and if anyone does, well,” he shrugged his massive shoulders and pointed to the door. “High tide is coming soon, and unless you’re a good swimmer, that’s just another body for the city to clean up—or in your case, two bodies.”

  With growing horror, Harry realized that these people would do anything to maintain their privacy. “You’re saying that you’d drown us?”

  Mr. Bald offered a mean smile. “Accidents happen.”

  This time, the entire group started to guffaw as if their leader’s statement was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, and Harry knew they’d stop at nothing in their quest for privacy. “How about this,” he offered. “You let us go, we just walk away, and no one knows. We don’t want to be here, and—”

  “They’re not listening, Harry,” Anastasia suddenly said, her voice hoarse and with a tinge of rising anger in it. She was getting ready to rumble. “They don’t care. I bought what they were selling a long time ago.”

  The almost toothless man stared hard at her through red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t know what you are, kitty-girl, but you shouldn’t be talking back to us, especially since you’re tied up.”

  “Don’t call me kitty.” Her eyes, luminous now in the darkness, narrowed, and a look of impending doom flared in them. Harry saw the muscles in her shoulders tense and then began to swell. Her legs also seemed to get larger, her tail coiled around the pipe, and he knew that what was going to happen soon would not be pleasant.

  Mr. Bald walked over to her and cupped her chin in one massive paw, squeezing it and jerking her head left and right. His voice took on a deeper quality, the same as the members of the topside lynch mob. “Y’know, I never ate a cat before, but there’s always a first time.”

  He leaned in closer and Harry saw the look of soon-to-be-dished-out violence in his girlfriend’s eyes. The fire was building, and soon it would consume her and anyone in her way. “Try it,” she growled, and snapped at his hand.

  Mr. Bald jerked it away just in time. “You little...” he started to say.

  “Last chance,” Harry chimed in. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Shut your mouth, kid,” the bald leader barked out and this time a decisive look came over his face. Taking a step back, he waved his hand at someone in the circle below. “Get me a knife,” he called out to the people below. “I need a big one. Miss Kitty is about to get—”

  With a sudden shriek of rage, Anastasia
burst free from her bonds and snapped her legs outward and upward. Her momentum carried her feet right into the face of the big man, catching him just under his chin and knocking him backwards. Performing a mid-air flip, she landed on her feet and balanced lightly on her toes

  He blurted out, “Oh holy god...”

  That was as far as he got. Anastasia’s tail whipped around and across his face, staggering him. “I told you,” she growled as she seized him by the throat, her sharp claws biting into his flesh deep enough to hurt but not kill, “don’t ever call me Miss Kitty.”

  “Please...please don’t hurt me,” he gurgled.

  “You look like you can take it,” she answered.

  With a mighty yank, she lifted him clear off the ground and hurled him off the steps and into the fire below. He screamed and rolled around in a frantic attempt to beat out the flames. The other denizens scattered to avoid being burned.

  “I warned him,” Harry said softly.

  Anastasia twisted her head around to spear him with a gaze of controlled yet absolute fury. “Are you going to say stop?”

  “No.”

  It probably wouldn’t have stopped her, anyway, he thought as he watched her leap from the stairs into the chamber. The pack had already regrouped and this time they had their weapons ready. Having weapons didn’t help, though. With lightning fast reflexes, she evaded every slash and jab and swing they took, and soon the entire group lay in a pile, moaning.

  Anastasia took her time climbing the stairs, and once at the top, she muttered, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Emerging from the chamber, they descended the steps and Harry saw that their situation had gotten even worse. The tide had now swelled to chest level, and while he hated the idea of wading through this river of gunk, it was a lot better than being caught—again.