Rise of the Transgenics (25 page)

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...”

Ten minutes later, Farrell had arranged
everything. After giving Jason a code to tell Maze, he told him to
wait. The FBI would return his computers and more importantly,
hers, with no information lost. A half hour after the information
exchange began Farrell called back and checked with Jason on
speaker phone.

“Has your friend gotten the location?” he
wanted to know, and motioned for Harry to hand him the pad and
pencil that sat on his night table. He grabbed the pencil and
laboriously printed out the address. “You’re sure of this?” His
voice sounded urgent.

“She’s sure,” his friend’s voice come over
the line. “Maze got the address, no sweat.”

“Good,” Farrell responded. “Sit tight, kid,
and all will be well.”

Well, at least I’m not the only being called
kid,
Harry thought.

After ringing off, Farrell twisted his body
around, giving a slight grunt of pain as he did so, and handed over
the paper. “This is the address, kid. Go to the airport now. It’s
late, so there won’t be any traffic. The driver is waiting for you
downstairs. Good luck.”

Slowly, he lay back on the bed, groaning as
he did so. “Wish I could go with you,” he murmured.

Anastasia touched him briefly on the shoulder
as she went to the door. “We’ll be back soon.”

“I’m counting on it.”

Downstairs, the driver, a short, stocky
unsmiling man, waited for them outside a black sedan with the motor
running. If he felt any shock over Anastasia’s appearance, he
didn’t show it. Getting in, he immediately took off, and soon they
were on the highway.

Farrell had been wrong about the traffic,
though. He hadn’t figured on the police presence, as the word on
Harry and Anastasia’s innocence hadn’t been passed. This...might be
trouble. “What are you going to do?” Harry asked.

Up ahead, a police officer was waving a
flashlight and directing traffic. “Keep your mouth shut,” the agent
ordered. “Crouch down and hide your heads. I’ll handle this.”

Moving into one of the stop-and-check spaces,
the agent opened his window, flashed the badge, and said that he
had clearance. “I’ve got a lead on the escapees’ whereabouts.”

Waving him onwards, the agent roared off down
the highway, and then slowed down. “What’s going on?” Harry
said.

“Accident,” the agent grunted. He looked at
his watch. “I can take an off-ramp and use a different route.”
Cutting over to the off-ramp, he moved into another lane and sped
up.

Harry glanced at the sky, which was now dark,
and wondered if the plane and authorization to Russia would come
through. It all seemed perfect—on paper. Still, paper theories and
real life rarely coincided...

Anastasia suddenly sat up in her seat.
“What...what’s that up ahead?”

It was Lyudmila, standing in the center of
the highway. Although it was dark and she had dark fur, her white
teeth gleamed, as did her eyes, a brilliant yellow full of rage and
vengeance.

The agent pulled out his pistol and fired,
but she leapt aside, twisting her body sharply this way and that to
avoid the bullets. As they sped past, she let out a high, shrill
whistle.

“What in the hell?” the agent yelled, his
cool demeanor gone. Keeping one hand on the wheel, with the other
he quickly ejected the spent clip in his pistol and shoved in a
fresh one. “What in the hell was that?”

“The enemy,” Anastasia said, tensing for
action. “She must have tracked us here.”

Tracking or no, they had another problem, and
Harry noticed it sat pawing the road dead ahead. It was Piotr,
gearing himself up for a charge. The driver also saw him, sped up
even faster by stomping his foot on the pedal, and maintained his
collision course with the charging rhino-boar. “Shoot him!” Harry
yelled out.

Pulling out his pistol, the agent leaned out
the window and fired once, twice, and then again, but while the
bullets entered the rampaging Piotr’s body, they didn’t slow him
down for an instant.

With a feeling of inevitability settling over
him, Harry grabbed Anastasia and they braced for the impact. It
came as no surprise when it happened. He saw the creature smash
into the car, felt the shock, heard the awful rending sound of
metal being torn and crushed and mangled, and then knew nothing
more.

When knocked out, the victim is supposed to enter a
world of darkness with no movement or sensation at first, although
dreams sometimes intrude. Harry’s state of unconsciousness began
with a series of flashing lights and pain from an unspecified
source. He felt someone lift him and toss him onto a hard surface.
Whatever he’d been thrown into, it was moving, and moving fast.

Coming to for the briefest of moments, he
heard the sound of the wind roaring in his ears. Movement, too—he
was moving, or rather, something was moving, and he was in it.

The loud, droning sound of engines filled his
ears...this had to be a cargo plane. He turned his head to the
right. Wooden crates, boxes, and duffel bags filled his immediate
point of view. They all had Russian writing on them. Great, he was
on a transport plane, and in a macabre moment, he wondered if this
plane was safe. Russian commercial air service had one of the worst
safety records in the world.

Moment of grim humor over, he twisted his
head to the left, and his girlfriend’s prostrate body lay there
limp and unresponsive. “Anastasia, are you okay?” he whispered,
trying to fight down a wave of nausea and pain. She didn’t answer,
and then the face of Lyudmila got in the way. “Where am...?” he
started to say.

“He’s coming around,” she said and motioned
to someone.

Another voice, rough, heavy, with an accent,
took over. It didn’t take a genius to know who was talking. “I see
to that.”

A heavy fist descended on his temple, stars
flashed, and then Harry descended back into the well of darkness.
His last thought before the blackness took over was that he wanted
to be the one—for once—to do the knocking out.

Hours later—he figured the time it took from
New York to Russia to be roughly twelve hours—Harry woke up and saw
a tarmac. On one side, he saw a forest, sparsely treed and covered
in snow. On the other lay a vast network of ruined structures, a
massive factory complex of pipes, scattered rocks and brick and
metal. Every building left standing sported rusted white pipes.
They looked entirely abandoned and in a severe state of
disrepair.

“Welcome to the Ukraine, Chernobyl,”
Lyudmila told him, and added, entirely without irony, “Welcome to
my world.”

Her rough hand grasped his shoulder and
propelled him through the cabin and down the steps to the concrete.
He tripped on the third step from the bottom and sprawled into a
light coating of snow. It was cold, with a harsh wind whipping
around, and he shivered.

Piotr walked down the stairs with Anastasia
slung over his shoulder. “My head still hurt,” he announced in the
direction of his girlfriend. “My body hurt, too. I must see
Grushenko. He will help me, yes? Doctor will come soon?”

“Soon, my darling, soon,” she reassured him,
caressing his features with her hand. He nodded and stood
motionless, awaiting orders. Lyudmila swiveled her gaze to Harry
and asked, “What do you think?”

What could he think? From what he’d read in
the papers and on the Internet, this had been the worst disaster in
the history of nuclear power. Thousands had been exposed to the
radiation from the ruptured reactor, along with contamination to
the water supply. The total number of thyroid cancer cases in and
around this area was expected to reach at least five thousand by
year’s end, if not more. “The place looks deserted,” was all he
could get out at first.

A mild hmmphing sound came from his female
captor. “It is,” she said. “We are near Pripyat, which is close to
the northern border of Belarus. After the disaster almost thirty
years ago, the entire town was evacuated, although not right away.
Many people got sick, many died...” she spoke in a monotone... “And
many more will most likely die. This is the legacy of the old
government before
glasnost.
”

Harry said nothing. He felt a massive wave of
pity as he stood in this ruined, sick, and twisted version of what
had once been a thriving industrial area. Hundreds of thousands of
innocent people had died. More would probably die of radiation
poisoning in the future. Was this what Grushenko’s research had
been for? If the Russians knew, if this Grushenko character was a
scientist, then why hadn’t he worked on a cure?

It wouldn’t do any good to ask Lyudmila any
of those questions. Either she didn’t know or she didn’t care.
Still, he did have something he needed to ask. “Is any radiation
still here?”

Lyudmila shook her head. “If you are
wondering are there any health risks? Then essentially the answer
is no. Unless you drink the water or eat the food, and I assure
you, that there will be no food or water given to you. I was told
that the exclusion zone was thirty kilometers, although that has
been expanded. While there is still some radioactive waste around,
my physiology is immune to it. As for you, you will not be here
long enough to worry about it. Neither will your whore of a
girlfriend.”

This thing was really beginning to bother
him, her and her supposed superiority. “Go to hell,” he said
defiantly.

She seemed to find his sudden burst of
courage amusing as she gave him a smirk and then began to chuckle.
The chuckle soon turned into a bout of full-scale laughter, but
only she seemed to find his attitude amusing. Piotr stared stupidly
and Harry said nothing at all. Abruptly, Lyudmila’s good humor
stopped and she snapped her fingers. “Move,” she commanded, and
they set off.

Walking through the silent air, Harry felt as
if the ghosts of Chernobyl were talking to him. Whispers of people
begging for help. Radiation—burned individuals, mothers, fathers
and children, pleading for someone to come to their aid. Their
silent cries asked why their own government had abandoned them.

Imagination—it had to be his imagination.
What wasn’t imagination, though, was the devastation of the area,
the isolation, and the utter sense of hopelessness as well as
helplessness that this place held as its legacy.

They kept walking through the empty area, and
neither Lyudmila nor Piotr said a word until they reached a
relatively undamaged building. Dirty white, it had five floors, and
while every single window had been broken, this one sported a
different look. Relatively new panes of steel lined the windows,
sealing off all the holes.

As for the rest of the immediate outside
area, glass and shards of graphite and smashed concrete littered
the ground. Lyudmila ordered him to halt. “Turn around,” she said
with an evil grin. Harry knew what was coming next, steeled his
nerve, and spun around. A massive right paw greeted him.

Waking up later on, he found himself in a
cell. Broken floor, a shattered ceramic toilet, four walls and an
iron door comprised his new home. Russian lettering was on the
wall. There was no window, and the door was solid iron with no
peephole. A tiny vent on the ceiling hissed out warm air. The
warmth inside the enclosure made the smell of blood, feces and
urine, and other odors, none of which was pleasant, much more
intense.

Where had they taken Anastasia? Perhaps this
was the laboratory—or a jail. Getting to his feet, he moved stiffly
and painfully at first, but he pushed the pain to the back of his
mind. Pacing back and forth, he knew that they’d come for him soon,
and then maybe he’d get some answers.

In a flash of sudden fear, he also knew what
would happen after that, and while he didn’t relish dying, he
steeled his nerve. Death was never a pleasant prospect, but without
his girlfriend, then life wasn’t really worth living.

The sounds of footsteps approaching made him
turn around. With a creak of its hinges, the door opened, and
Lyudmila stood there, alone and unarmed. “Are you feeling more
awake now? So sorry for Piotr hitting you, but it was
necessary.”

In a sudden switch in character, she threw up
her arms as if trying to excuse her compatriot’s demented behavior.
“He is so stupid! I tell him, not the head. The head is the most
important place. But does he listen?
Nyet,
he is without
brains.”

She rambled on in Russian and then motioned
for him to follow her. Her character then switched back to its
usual imperious version. “We are going to have a meeting now. Come
with me. Please do not try to fight. I am twice as strong as you
are and much faster. Your girlfriend is well, by the way. See, I
did not call her a whore this time.”

Letting her insult pass, Harry demanded,
“Where is she?”

A raspy and unpleasant chuckle came from his
captor. “You are not one to ask questions.
We
ask questions
and you answer. Come.”