“Good thing he didn’t mention my name,” said Harry, trying to find a little humor in the situation.
“Additional reports state that the ringleader is Harry Goldman, a teenager who is said to be extremely intelligent as well as violent. These four individuals are considered to be extremely dangerous and are to be avoided until the police can arrest them.”
Anastasia chuckled softly from her bent over position. “You spoke too soon. So now you’re the ringleader,” she said. “I always wanted to be public enemy number one.”
“Hey, I need my fifteen minutes,” he cracked back, although he knew the situation had gotten out of hand. So far, he’d been accused of being a mass murderer and a ringleader. What was next, a master of the world scenario? He wouldn’t have put it past any amateur psychologist or psychiatrist to lay down some assessment and convince everyone he was insane.
His attention returned to Earth as the radio report switched to an announcement by the Chief of Police, Brian Matthews, the man they’d seen on the news broadcast earlier on. “These four individuals have committed the most atrocious murders,” he stated in a somber voice. “We want to emphasize that the citizens of New York should not take the law into their own hands.”
“Good luck with that,” Anastasia commented, and the irony rang clearly in her voice.
The report continued with the Chief ordering ordinary citizens to stay safe and stay aware. “These four individuals are homicidal maniacs, and after consulting with the other division commanders, I have given my men the order of shoot to kill...”
Okay, now he could add homicidal maniac to the list. Harry turned off the radio, shaking his head and worried about the possibility of an ambush somewhere down the line. “Well, that’s just great,” he murmured and gave his girlfriend a quick glance. “You can get out and hide in the countryside if you want.”
Anastasia smacked his arm gently. “The only place I’m going is to the hospital, with you,” she reminded him. “We’re together in this. Now drive.”
Upon reaching the turnoff, he made a right and they took the off-ramp that would take them as far as the hospital. “So what’s the plan?” he repeated, trying to consider all the angles and coming up empty on every one of them. “They’ll have guards there,” he said. “Farrell said this hospital was tied to the FBI, so that means security will be double what it usually is.”
Anastasia’s frown combined with scrunched eyebrows meant that she was thinking of something.
“What is it?” he asked.
Voice full of rancor she answered, “You’d think he’d be on our side, but no. You heard what the radio announcer said. You heard what the Chief of Police said.”
Harry had been turning over that idea in his mind for a long time. “I think Farrell is on our side. Merton told me before the other two transgenics killed him that this was a secret project. It was supposed to be just you, me, Farrell and him in on it. Merton’s dead, and so is everyone else who might have known. That means we can’t rely on anyone else, only Farrell.”
“So why didn’t he say anything earlier on?” she asked with a note of doubt in her voice.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t know, just that...maybe he got injured worse than we thought and he couldn’t call off his dogs in time. He was in bad shape when we dropped him off at the hospital. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
“We’re screwed, no matter what,” Anastasia muttered. She finally put forth the million-dollar question. “How will we get in, then?”
It was a fair question. Unsure of how to answer, Harry mumbled, “Well, we have to scope out the place first and check the floor plan inside.” He wished he had better life-planning skills. “Maybe we’ll have to double-check that we can bypass the security and...”
“That sounds pretty complicated,” Anastasia cut in, but with a smile on her face. “I think you should stick to research. Warfare isn’t your field.”
Harry decided she was right and he knew dick. “Okay, I’m not going to be a field general. So what’s your brilliant plan?”
“Simple.” She grinned. “I let them see me and chase me.”
“Really, now?” There was ludicrous, and then there was suicidal. This plan lay somewhere between both poles. “I thought the whole objective was not to be seen,” he said, perplexed by the idea of almost giving up.
Laying her hand on his arm, Anastasia’s voice sounded confident. “First off, they’ll never catch me,” she said. “Second, the opposition”—he knew she meant Lyudmila and Piotr—”won’t be stupid enough to try to follow me to a place with heavily armed personnel. Third, while the police are chasing me, that’ll give you the chance to go in and see Farrell.”
It was certainly a risk, but with no other options, they had to try something. They parked the car a couple of blocks away from the hospital—the situation seemed dire right away. Men in black suits patrolled the perimeter, and even in the darkness, he saw the flash of their pistols. They were taking no chances.
“So what’s the plan?” he asked.
“Give me ten minutes.”
Anastasia took off like a shot and Harry waited near the car, crouched down behind the trunk and hoping that an agent wouldn’t come out and arrest or shoot him. He hoped Farrell would actually believe their story. There was no reason why he wouldn’t. He’d seen the monsters. He knew, and...
“Hey.”
The voice, spoken softly, jarred him from his reverie. Anastasia had returned and crouched down beside him. “I found out where he is.” She held up her claws. “I always knew these would be good for something. I climbed the side of the building and scouted around. Second floor, room two-one-two, so take the emergency stairs and you might not be caught in the confusion.”
“What confusion?” Harry asked.
“Mine. Watch me,” she said with a tiny grin. Swiftly, she planted a kiss on his lips and tore off into the night yelling, “Hey, morons, come and get me!”
Harry watched her go and waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, the men outside the hospital took off after her into the brush. Five seconds later, he heard the sound of cries of pain, a gunshot, and then another yelp of agony. Anastasia broke cover, ran into the hospital, and came out again with five more agents and two police officers on her tail. The jangling sound of an alarm going off filled the air.
“If this is your idea of a diversion, it’s pretty good,” he muttered and ran toward the door as fast as his feet could take him. Fortunately, the lobby was empty, and when he checked the stairs, they were empty as well. He ascended them two at a time, found Farrell’s room unguarded, and crept in.
Shadows swathed the room, but from what Harry could make out, it looked like a typical hospital affair consisting of a bed, a nightstand with a notepad and a pencil on it along with a single window. It smelled of antiseptic, clean, sterile, and impersonal. “Agent Farrell,” he whispered and stopped moving as he felt the muzzle of a pistol tap the side of his head.
“If you’re going to creep into a room,” Farrell said from his right side, “then you better check the corners first.”
He flicked on the light and painfully limped over to the bed. When his eyes adjusted, Harry saw that his contact had a thick bandage stuck on the right side of his face and his right arm was in a cast bound up in a sling. “Yeah, that rhino guy broke my right arm,” Farrell said in a sour voice, wincing with every word he said. “I’m getting a little tired of being beaten up all the time.”
“It comes with the territory,” Harry offered.
“Yeah, that it does. Let me make a call first and tell my agents to stand down.”
Twenty minutes later, after Farrell had first called off his men and then drunk a bottle of water, he sat in bed tiredly rubbing his head and cursing the inefficiency and stupidity of the police. “When I first got here, they doped me up right away and stuck me in surgery. I couldn’t tell anyone.
“Added to that, this project is under wraps, at leas
t as far as you and Anastasia are concerned. The rest of the FBI agents didn’t know. But I had to speak to the men in my office—those that survived, that is—and then call the Chief of Police to tell him to call off the search for you two.”
“He hasn’t so far,” Harry pointed out.
Farrell grunted a sound of frustration. “I’ll get back on it. In the meantime, I’d still be on the lookout for mobs.”
Recalling his near escapes, Harry nodded his head in agreement. “Tell me all about it.” Briefly, he related his adventures to Farrell.
“Well, that’s human nature for you.” Farrell leaned back and squirmed around. It was plain to see he was concerned, though, as worry lines etched in his forehead. When he spoke, the despair was plain to hear in his voice—that, and anger. “We lost so many people at headquarters. Merton’s dead, many of the men and women I knew—dead—and all the information is gone.”
“Gone?”
Farrell suddenly recovered enough to sit up and his usual hard-ass attitude returned. “Yeah, it’s gone. The people who survived, they told me that the lab—your lab—was trashed, the Genesis Chamber destroyed, and your computer smashed. They also said someone had smashed your discs. The file on Merton’s desk with all your notes is missing. Maybe he hid it, maybe he burned it or maybe those two killers took it. I don’t know.” With a sudden groan, he sank back into the sheets once again.
Harry also experienced a sinking feeling. If the mayhem duo got their hands on his notes, then this Grushenko character could build his own version of the Genesis Chamber. If he did that, then who knew what horrors would be created?
Then again, considering how perfect Lyudmila was in her own warped way, maybe Grushenko had already done so. There were so many unanswered questions, enough to make any person’s head spin.
Chiefly, though, Harry wondered why they hadn’t taken the computer and the discs. Everything he’d done, from cell analysis to chemical re-compositing to detailed matrixes showing the finished product and result of fusing animal and human DNA, it had all been there. It didn’t make sense.
A knock at the door signaled a visitor. Anastasia strolled in, her body unscathed by the recent hide-and-go-seek escapade. “You’re alive,” she greeted the agent coolly.
“I got lucky,” Farrell answered. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
It seemed that being mauled by an enhanced monster hadn’t dimmed the agent’s sense of sarcasm, at least where Anastasia was concerned. He leveraged his body to the side of the bed and sat up. “We have to talk.”
Quickly, they hashed out a plan. “I can get you a plane over to Russia, but I have to clear it with the State Department first,” Farrell told them. “That’ll take an hour at least, and they’ll have to get authorization from the President, not to mention the Russians. That might take longer.”
“Can you do that?” Anastasia asked.
The agent frowned. “On my end, yes, setting up a plane is pretty easy. We have some private jets stationed at JFK Airport, just in case. We can get clearance from the flight planners.”
“Fine, that’s step one taken care of,” Harry said. “Problem of transportation, solved.”
“That isn’t what we have to worry about, though.”
“What is?” Harry pressed, although thinking about it he shouldn’t have had to ask the question in the first place.
The key difficulty lay with the nature of the Russian government. Russians tended to be very xenophobic. Even with one of their own going rogue and creating unspeakable horrors in some hidden lab, they didn’t want to face public embarrassment.
Farrell explained all this very quickly and simply. “And it is embarrassing for them. All this time they’ve put on a show of not knowing jack about what was going down, but once it’s made public, it’ll go right to the Kremlin. Not even the state-controlled press can keep it a secret forever. Many people are involved. Heads are going to roll.”
“It’s already public,” Harry pointed out.
“And it’s here,” Anastasia said, adding to his statement. She got up to pace the room, her body taut and her voice sharp. “I remember now how secretive Nurmelev was when he made me the first time. He didn’t have anyone else in his lab. It was just us, always us.”
Anger bristled in her voice as she spoke, and the hair on her shoulders stood straight up. “Personally, I think you should hold a press conference to show to everyone what I am so they can see what they did to me. My own people—they did this to me!”
“Yeah, and what happens if another mob comes after us?” Harry countered. “What do we do then?”
Her body began to quiver. “Harry, you’re still human. The worst they can do to you is put you in jail, but I’m already there.”
Immediately, her claws sprang out and she took a swipe at the wall, leaving deep gashes in it. “My own people...I wasn’t anything else except some kind of plaything. I had a life...and they took it from me. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was mine, and then suddenly...it wasn’t.”
Her eyes watered and Harry immediately went to her side, awkwardly placing his arms around her. She clung to him for a second, her body quivering with full-out ire, then pushed him away. “Wait, just wait a minute. You need to hear this, and you need to hear this too, Agent Farrell.”
Leaning against the wall, she wiped her eyes, and her voice shook as she related her ordeal. “I don’t remember all the details, but what Nurmelev did,” her eyes got a haunted look in them, “that, I can’t forget. He strapped me down, twenty-three hours a day. I was fed through an IV drip. No bathroom privileges. I lay in my own waste. They drugged me half the time, but I could smell my own body odor, and I hated it.
“And then there were the injections, the combinations of drugs, and even though I was doped up a lot, the pain still came through. Do you know what it was like?”
The expression on her face turned fierce. “It was like knives being inserted slowly into every muscle and tendon and cell of my body. I screamed. I vomited on myself. I cried and begged and pleaded, and what happened? He laughed. He laughed and kept the experiment going...”
As she spoke, Harry’s sense of outrage grew, but he knew whatever he said wouldn’t assuage her grief in any way. This was something he could never truly understand. Her eyes blazed with total fury as she ranted on...and her rant was thoroughly justified.
She finished by saying, “So don’t you or anyone else come to me with keeping this private. I’m living proof of what people will do just to see what will happen. And if I wasn’t scared of getting shot or thrown into jail for being what I am, I’d go on every damn television station in the world and show what my people did to me.”
She sagged down to the ground, one hand covering her face but not attempting to wipe away the rivulets that flowed from her eyes and ran like mini-rivers down her cheeks.
Pitiful didn’t even begin to cover how horrible her story was, Harry thought, and he started to go over to her. Farrell, though, beat him to it. He awkwardly got up from his bed and limped over to her. Kneeling slowly and stiffly, he placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get them, Anastasia,” he said in a soft voice. “And you’re part of our world now, if that means anything.”
Looking up at him with a tear-stained face, she sobbed out, “I haven’t been very nice to you.”
“You don’t have to be,” he answered. “My job does not compel me to be nice, either. To be honest, that’s why my wife left me and why my daughter—she’s about your age now—doesn’t want to see me. That’s what kind of person I am.”
He stood up slowly, wincing at every sudden change in body angle. “However, I can promise you this much. Once this is over, we will make this as public as we can. People will still stop and stare. There’s nothing I can do about that. But you’ll always have a place with us.”
Listening in, Harry tried to suppress a smile, but couldn’t. It seemed that the agent was doing his best to wipe away his image as a robotic hardass keeper
of the realm. Anastasia got to her feet and tentatively put out an arm to help him to stand erect. “Thanks,” she whispered.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving off her offer of assistance. Groaning, he got into bed. “Okay, so getting to the airport is one thing, and once you’re inside Russia, that’s another. Assuming our Russian allies aren’t so cooperative, you’ll need a location.”
“We know they’re in Chernobyl,” Harry said.
Farrell nodded. “Chernobyl is actually in the Ukraine, and it’s an awfully big factory.”
He pulled out his smartphone and typed in some information. A second later, a picture of an abandoned factory complex sprang up on the small screen. “That’s Chernobyl. There’s wreckage everywhere, and God knows how much radiation is still present. It’s been sealed off by the Russian government since nineteen eighty-six.”
“Good news,” Harry muttered.
A frustrated grunt came from the agent’s mouth. “Here’s some more good news. There might be dozens of labs or hidden research areas. We have to know exactly where to go. The problem is that we don’t know much if anything about where a lab might be.”
A second later, Harry snapped his fingers and looked at the agent. “I know someone who does.”
Two seconds after that, Farrell placed the call on his cellphone to Jason’s house, and handed it over once the phone rang.
Harry connected to his friend. “How’s Maze doing?” he asked.
“Man, they took all her computers and software,” he moaned. “Storm troopers, that’s all they are. My girlfriend is really bummed about this. Cops came back after they arrested you, took her stuff, and then they came to my house and took my stuff. This sucks!”
He relayed the information to Farrell.
The older man nodded. “Give me the phone.”
Harry handed it back to him, and the agent spoke into it very carefully. “Kid, you’ll get your computers back, and so will your friend. Now here’s what I want you to do...”
Rise of the Transgenics Page 18