Revolution (2 page)

His cover blown, escape plan number one lay
in the windows, but they were too high up. Having no choice, he
retreated to the far wall. Harry thought of jumping to his right,
but when he tried, an invisible barrier stopped his advance.
Growling in frustration, he tried the same tactic, this time to the
left side, and came up against the same kind of barrier. He could
not go backward. He was trapped. With a hiss of pure rage, he
attempted to flee between the monster’s legs.

It didn’t work, as with a motion too fast for
his eyes to follow, the creature reached down and snagged him by
the throat. In a casual display of strength, it reached over with
its free hand and crushed a corner of the table as if it were
tissue paper. “You see, you see what I can do?” it asked.

“
How about you see what I can do,” a voice
called out.

Harry twisted his head and saw Anastasia,
also in cat form, approach on the run. She leaped up and slashed at
the monster’s head, drawing blood, thick, heavy and red, from its
neck. The monster roared, but not in pain. It seemed that it liked
being cut. With another casual move, it caught her around her waist
and crushed her. It then tossed the limp corpse aside.

“
No!” Harry screamed, his voice suddenly
manifesting itself. This couldn’t be happening. His girlfriend, his
love, his life—she was dead. “I’ll kill you for this!”

A laugh came from the monster. “Will you
now?” it asked with the confidence of someone who had all the power
in the world at his—or its—disposal.

With another effortless motion, it lifted him
off the ground as easily as a child would lift a toy from the play
chest. Harry struggled, clawed at the massive hand that had a hold
of his throat and squirmed in a desperate effort to escape. His
consciousness began to blur out and with it, his life. With his
last breath, he croaked out, “Who are you?”

“
I am your end,” the giant said. Grinning
now, he began to squeeze...

“No!”

Harry awoke with a shout, the sweat bursting
from every pore. His heart hammered against his chest wall like a
trip hammer on amphetamines. He wiped away the sweat on his
forehead and looked around, his eyes darting left and right, taking
in every detail. After taking in a deep breath, he found that all
was normal.

Normal meant living in a log cabin, the cabin
that he and Anastasia shared. Normal meant that their
surroundings—the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York—were quiet
and undisturbed. Normal meant that they were alone, untouched and
safe. So if all was normal, then why was he feeling so uneasy, and
why had he dreamed that dream?

“Hey, are you okay?”

Anastasia, his girlfriend of almost nine
months, stirred beside him. She sat up to put her arm around his
shoulder and repeated the question. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he responded, trying to
sound nonchalant when he’d just had the nightmare of all
nightmares. Who cared if having a dream was supposed to be a
cliché? It had been so real, the voice, the clutching hand...
everything.

Worst of all was the idea that Anastasia had
died in the dream and no, he was not about to tell her. This
happened to be the first time she’d ever appeared in the dream.
Without her... he shut that part of his mind down. To be without
her would be the same as not breathing.

Still, the traces of the dream remained and
the memory made him shiver, the warmth of the summer
notwithstanding. The Catskills were cool at this time of year and
most people used blankets. Harry had no need of pajamas. He wore
only boxer shorts and slept with a t-shirt and nothing more.

After taking in another deep breath, he felt
his heart resume its normal beat and nodded. Pitch black though the
room was, he saw just as well as in the light. Everything was as it
should be. The place was spacious, replete with all the modernity
one would expect in this day and age—fully equipped kitchen,
internet connection, television, couches, telephone and more. He
swung his gaze back to his girlfriend’s face. Her eyes held a look
of deep concern.

“Nothing’s here,” she said. “I saw you
checking things out. Night vision’s a real bonus, isn’t it?”

He nodded. One of the perks of being
enhanced, he thought. His life of being enhanced had been short,
only three months, but in that time he’d discovered strengths and
abilities far beyond what anyone could have predicted.

It had all been due to Anastasia. He’d met
her nine months earlier. She was a Russian girl and the product of
transgenic engineering. Her genes had been mixed with those of a
cat and while she retained her figure and her femininity, she had
abilities far beyond those of someone who just had fur on her body.
Faster, stronger and more agile than three gymnasts, power-lifters
and mixed martial artists combined, she had claws, fighting skills
and enhanced senses far above the norm.

She’d also suffered from amnesia. Over time,
she remembered her name, the name of the scientist—now dead—who’d
experimented on her, and what she’d been in her past life. It
hadn’t been a happy one. She’d contracted AIDS, and the scientist
had given her a new life at the expense of her humanity.

Harry had helped her as much as he could and
had fallen in love with her along the way. Anastasia had felt the
same way about him and they’d been inseparable ever since. They’d
had many adventures, the latest being a duel to the death in
Chernobyl, where she’d faced off against another cat-girl and
defeated her.

The cat-girl, Lyudmila, had a boyfriend named
Piotr, a hideous mix of rhino and boar. He’d laid a tremendous
beating on Harry, almost killing him. Harry had managed to inject
himself with a serum that altered his genes and started the
transformation. Started... but not finished.

That was where the Genesis Chamber came in. A
cigar tube of life and transformation and possible death, it had
turned him from a skinny eighteen year-old with nondescript
features into something more than human, but less than cat. He’d
retained his looks, but his body had become more muscular, he
sported claws and now had gray fur with black spots and yellow
eyes, the same as Anastasia.

And here they were, and here she was with her
arm around him. Blinking, he came back to the present. “Yeah, I’m
fine,” he repeated.

Anastasia got out of bed and flicked on the
light. She wore a pair of pajamas and her body, lithe and
beautiful, moved gracefully as she came back to the bed and sat
down. “You had the dream again, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did,” he admitted, feeling somewhat
ashamed. “It was pretty intense.”

Her eyes, large and expressive, gazed at him
with concern. “You’ve been having those nightmares for what, a
month?”

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right.”

“You know, we could always talk to Farrell,”
she suggested. “He might have some more information on what you’re
thinking.”

Harry shook his head. The mention of Agent
Miles Farrell, his handler at FBI headquarters in Manhattan, meant
control. He was a good agent, stolid and workman-like and
professional to the max, but he was also incapable of understanding
what was involved here. Farrell happened to be the typical
by-the-book guy and he needed to follow office protocol, even if it
involved handling two transgenic cat people.

“Farrell’s been searching for the past three
months for others like us,” said Harry, shifting his body to lean
against hers. “He hasn’t found anything. But I know there’s
something out there. I can feel it. I don’t know how I know, but I
do.”

Anastasia offered a wise smile. “All the
dreams you have, you become a cat. You don’t have the urge to go
out and catch mice, do you?” she teased.

The remark stung, but only a little.
“No.”

Laying a hand on his shoulder, she added in a
voice most confident, “You’re not going to devolve. You know
that.”

“Yeah, I know.”

As the youngest expert in transgenic research
in the world and probably the best at what he did, Harry knew all
too well of the curse. Mixing animal genes with that of a human was
one thing, but the main drawback was that the animal genes would
soon overwhelm the human ones, force them to lie dormant and the
subject would revert to its animal form. He and Anastasia had been
spared that, largely due to his work in keeping the animal genes at
bay. However, there were others out there, and no telling what
state they were in or which side they were on in this fight.

“You’re not going to devolve,” Anastasia
repeated in an attempt to reassure him. “You’re not like Doug and
Ivan.”

“I know.”

Harry had already met a few of the other
enhanced people. Like Anastasia, they were the products of
experimentation performed by Russian scientists over the past three
or four years. Anastasia had been the first success, then Doug and
then Ivan. Doug’s genes had been mixed with that of a dog. Ivan had
been more bear than man. In fact, he was a monster that enjoyed
killing more than anything, an almost unstoppable force of nature.
He’d eventually died at Anastasia’s hands. She’d torn his throat
out, thus ending the threat. Still, the memories lingered in
Harry’s mind. He couldn’t forget and didn’t want to.

“I miss Doug,” said Harry as the image of the
little dog-man flashed through his mind. Doug had attacked Ivan,
knowing that he wouldn’t survive. He’d marched forward, stalwart,
unafraid, resigned to his fate, and he’d died a most brutal
death.

“I miss him, too,” Anastasia said in a soft
voice. “We’ll never forget him.”

They hadn’t, but life went on. Only three
months earlier, two other transgenic monsters named Lyudmila and
Piotr had appeared. In a violent battle, both had died, but not
before mentioning something about thirty-five other enhanced
individuals who’d escaped. The FBI in league with some European
countries was in the process of trying to find them. So far, they’d
had no luck.

Harry sat lost in his memories until the
touch of his girlfriend’s hand, covered in fur, soft and fine,
brought him back to reality. “Listen,” said Anastasia, her voice
low and sweet, “Farrell called me yesterday while you were in the
shower. He’s coming by in the morning with supplies. We’ll talk to
him then, okay?”

Harry forced out a smile. “Yeah, we’ll talk.
Let’s go back to bed.”

Anastasia got up and padded over to the wall.
A flick of her finger doused the lights and her yellow eyes shone
in the darkness. Harry lay back and felt the warmth of his
girlfriend next to him. Her hand came up to touch his face. “I have
to tell you something,” she said in a drowsy voice.

“What?”

“I love you.”

She turned over then and soon he heard her
quiet, rhythmical breathing. A smile crossed his face and he put
his arm around her waist. A faint purr came from her—then silence.
Love was fine, but the feeling of uncertainty remained, and he lay
awake until the early hours of the morning.

Awakening at the crack of dawn, Harry slipped
out of bed. Anastasia was still asleep, so he decided to do the
shower-and-shave thing, with the emphasis on shaving. It was a
daily ordeal, heavier than what most men had to go through, and he
really didn’t care for it.

Inside the bathroom, he observed his physique
in the full-length mirror. An image of a young man with gray hair
and black spots all over his body, fur on his face, whiskers, and
yellow eyes greeted him.

The fur on his body had been there since
going through the Genesis Chamber, but the facial growth hadn’t
started until recently. Late genes kicking in, he thought as he ran
his hand around his face. “It’s not easy being furry,” he muttered
as he took a disposable razor—one of seven—and after running some
hot water over it, started to carefully shave his forehead.

Once that razor got clogged up, he tossed it
away and used another. This was his ritual every morning as his fur
and genetics resisted change. The hair always grew back, a slow but
steady advance, so by noon it appeared as if he had a five o’clock
shadow.

Shaving chores over, he entered the shower,
rinsed off and after shaking the excess water from his body, used a
blow dryer to style. Towels didn’t really cut it. Job over, he
padded outside and went to the closet where he got dressed in a
long-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans.

“I hear something,” Anastasia called out
while he finished dressing. “It sounds like Farrell’s car.”

Harry walked over to the window, noted the
time on the clock—ten-thirty—and saw the banged up Ford that their
contact always drove. He opened the door and called out, “Yeah,
he’s here. Let’s greet the man in black.”

Farrell got out of his car and jogged over to
the cabin with a couple of plastic bags in his hands. “And to what
do we owe this visit?” asked Anastasia as she came to the door. Her
voice sounded like ice cubes rattling in a glass. “You called us
up. Today’s Tuesday. You usually come by on Wednesday to deliver
the groceries.”

Apparently, Farrell was immune to her
iciness. When she’d turned up in New York, memory impaired, feral
and wary, he’d considered her a spy. Not true at all. She’d always
been loyal, but he occasionally questioned her patriotism.

With a polite nod, he handed over the bags to
her. “I have to coordinate with my men up here,” he said, gesturing
to the forest. “It’s a pretty big spread up here, and there’s a lot
of space for someone to hide.”

Anastasia’s icy demeanor evaporated and she
let out a giggle. “Yeah, I know. You’ve got two men.”

“Budget cuts,” said Farrell with a slight
shrug. “We do what we can.”

Anastasia continued to giggle. “Harry and I
go for runs at night and we see your men either sleeping on the job
or looking the wrong way. And they’ve got night vision goggles,
too.”