Revolution (14 page)

“Fine, we’re on it,” Anastasia cracked back.
“Get going.”

The agent took that opportunity to run back
to the cabin. Anastasia tore ahead. Harry followed her into the
darkness. There weren’t any lights strung here, but Harry kept up
with her and soon they arrived in the densest part of the
forest.

Aided by the moon along with his night
vision, he picked his way deftly over leaves and fallen logs.
Within seconds, he picked up the smell of something. It reminded
him of ammonia, only much stronger. The smell was mixed in with the
heavy cloying odor of blood. He took a few more steps and then
spotted something crawling fast off to their left.

“It’s over there,” he pointed.

“I see it.”

They slowed their pace and crept over, trying
to make as little noise as possible. Soon, they found their quarry
bent over the prostrate forms of three men. They were dead, as
their heads had been separated from their bodies and lay a few feet
away. The centipede thing turned around and indeed, it had a goat’s
head, along with long, straight horns and fangs dripping with flesh
and blood.

Harry took a closer look. The bodies
looked...
burned
in addition to being eviscerated. Was the
spray acidic?

More than likely it was, but there wasn’t a
whole lot of time to think about things, as the monster’s eyes,
round and large like softballs, bugged out in its grotesque head.
Its segmented exoskeleton glittered in the moonlight and it made
Harry think of a suit of armor. “Huh, you come to hurt me, is that
it?” it asked.

Like Szabo, this one had an accent, but it
didn’t sound Hungarian or Russian. “You got any ideas where it’s
from?” Harry whispered.

“It’s not from around here,” Anastasia
answered as she set her body in a fighting stance. “It doesn’t
sound Russian. It might be from another Slavic country.”

Point of origin didn’t really seem pertinent,
as the monster left off its kill and started toward them, moving
fast on its multiple legs. It attacked Anastasia first, gnashing at
her with its teeth. She deftly stepped out of harm’s way. “You can
do better than that,” she taunted.

As it stared at her through its enormous
eyes, something seemed to click, and the monster reared up on its
hindquarters. In the dark, its mouth glistened and Harry saw the
danger immediately. “Anastasia, get out of the way!” he cried.
“It’s going to spit at you!”

The warning came too late, as a foul smelling
liquid sprayed from the creature’s mouth. It had a powerful stink,
like wood alcohol combined with crap. The spray hit the surrounding
trees and grass and they began to smoke.
Acid... this thing uses
acid!

He yanked on his girlfriend’s arm, but not
before a gob of spit landed and began to sizzle. Anastasia screamed
and rolled away, landing on the ground and rubbing her arm into the
dirt. A second later, the smoke stopped, but she lay stunned from
the suddenness of the attack. “You like my spit?” the thing asked
in its heavy accent. “I have more.”

It quickly trundled over to her and once more
reared up, but after Anastasia scuttled off to safety, Harry moved
faster than he thought possible and sank his claws into each side
of the thing’s head. It screamed and thrashed around. He pushed his
hands in as deeply as they would go. A few seconds later, the thing
gave a horrid gurgling sound and collapsed.

“Spit on someone else,” Harry ground out and
ran over to Anastasia, who was in the process of sitting up and
holding her arm. In the moonlight, a sizable chunk of skin, roughly
three square inches, had been burned. Her fur had protected her
somewhat, but not enough. “How are you doing?”

She turned her head up, a grimace of pain
crossing her face. “I’ll live. Thanks for dealing with that
thing.”

“Let’s go back.”

Checking the area for further intruders,
Harry found nothing. As they retraced their steps and trudged their
way back to the cabin, he kept sniffing the air. This time, another
scent, heavy and thick, like fur, wafted over. Someone else was
here, he thought, watching and waiting, but Anastasia said nothing.
Soon the cabin loomed up, where Farrell stood outside the front
door, his gun drawn. “Did you get it?” he called out.

“He’s history,” Anastasia answered in a voice
choked with fatigue and pain. “I’m going to lie down.”

Farrell came over and in a surprising bit of
tenderness, draped her uninjured arm around his shoulder. “I’m
going to scout around,” Harry said. “I’ll be back soon.”

Anastasia gave him a look of concern, but
nodded and caressed his face with her good hand before the agent
escorted her inside. “Be careful, boyfriend.”

“You know I will.”

Farrell offered to go with him, but Harry
declined. “I have to do this on my own.”

He took off, going back along the path and
kept his nose moving, sampling and sorting the smells of the night.
They were many and varied—the rabbits taking their nightly sojourn
in order to munch on leaves, the smell of droppings from a squirrel
and the calls from the various night birds. However, the smell of
something animal and human combined... he smelled nothing.

He wondered if Szabo or the other experiments
had some kind of masking agent, like deodorant. His hopes of not
running into anything savage got dashed though, when he saw
something up ahead and pulled up short. The smell and the person—it
was Szabo. He wore the same clothes from their earlier encounter
and leaned against a tree, his arms crossed and a look of total
unconcern on his face. A pang of uncertainty hit Harry, but the
monster ahead of him didn’t seem to want to go on the
offensive.

“I thought that bringing my friends along
would draw you out,” Szabo began in a quiet, knowing tone. He
uncrossed his arms and stood totally at ease as if confident no one
would dare attack him. “I am assuming that my green friend at your
cabin gave you no trouble?”

“Anastasia took care of him.”

A glower crossed the shark thing’s face and
he spat on the ground. “Fah, he was a weak little worm, anyway. And
this one,” he waved his hand in the direction of the fallen
centipede, “he was a most formidable opponent, was he not?”

“Not really,” Harry answered and let the
claws on his hands spring out. “He wasn’t anything with my claws
stuck in his neck.” The smell of the beast still clung to him,
making his stomach roil, but he fought it off in order to listen.
“Are any of your other playmates around?”

A harsh laugh greeted his question. “No, now
it is just us two, standing in the moonlight and talking,” Szabo
replied in a most conversational manner, his previous bad mood
seemingly gone. “I really thought they would put up more of a
fight.”

“They did their best,” Harry replied and
tensed for the upcoming brawl.

Szabo, however, remained relaxed. His posture
indicated a certain amount of serenity and Harry figured that he
had every reason to feel safe. His minions had already ripped apart
three men. If being in control of your surroundings counted for
anything, then Szabo could be considered the temporary ruler of
this forest. “Are you that anxious to fight?” he asked.

“I will if I have to,” answered Harry,
quelling the fear inside him.

Szabo uncrossed his arms and flexed them.
They had to be around thirty inches long, impossible for anyone to
achieve... except where modern science entered the picture. Display
of strength over, he relaxed once more. “Do not fear. I shall not
kill you. I will also not kill those two friends of yours, the tall
girl and boy. They are excellent computer technicians and it would
be a waste. I am simply here to explain my vision, and all I
request is that you hear me out.”

Harry retracted his claws. “I’m
listening.”

Actually, he was listening for the sounds a
very large bird would make when swooping down to snatch its prey.
He was also training his ears on a source other than what passed
for regular wildlife, but heard nothing.

Szabo gave another barking laugh. “You do not
trust me? Ha, you are doing exactly what I would do, listening for
the sound of wings, yes? Do not worry. My girlfriend, when I broke
her out of the morgue back in Hungary, she decided not to join me
here. She has other things to do.”

“So what did you come here for?” Harry was
getting a little tired of this cat-and-mouse routine. “I’m not into
playing games with a whack-job who has daddy issues.”

Abruptly, Szabo’s good mood disappeared. His
eyes narrowed and a harsh tone entered his voice. “It would not be
wise to mention my father. You do not want to cross that line with
me, boy.”

His reply infuriated Harry and he stabbed his
hand at the corpses. “Hey, you crossed the line when you murdered
three men. Or your minions did. I don’t care which, so cut to the
chase, already.”

The monster’s mouth snapped shut with an
audible click. Harry figured that the father issue was something he
could use in the future and filed this moment away. Szabo inhaled
deeply and nodded. “All right, I will. I want you and Istvan to
come with me. I could use your skills and his, er, presence, in my
new world.”

Oh, here it came, talk of another utopia,
Harry thought. “You mean you want to kill the humans and live in
their cities, is that it? Are you making an army to overthrow the
government? Because if you are, it won’t—”

Szabo put up his hand, indicating he wanted
silence. “No, you are wrong. I do not wish to overthrow society.
The rest of the world can go its own way. All I desire is a place
where people, my people, can live by themselves. That is all. I
have no wish to return to being what I was. I simply want my own
little piece of this planet.”

“You mean... you want it by killing everyone
else?”

“No, I will get it by changing all those who
wish to be transformed. There are many people in today’s society
who do not fit in.”

A thoughtful tone entered his voice. “You do
not believe me? Think of all the people you knew growing up. How
many have become great? How many are on the fringes of society
because they do not fit in due to their race or religion or their
orientation? I think you know the answer. Study the statistics. You
will see that many of them are in their teens and early twenties.
They were promised something that society did not deliver. They
were promised chances and got none.”

As he spoke, the thoughtfulness gave way to
passion. Harry had to admit that Szabo was half-right. Still, it
was no reason to secede from humanity. “That doesn’t mean they’ll
want to be changed,” he argued. “I mean, no one is promised
anything. They can fight for what they want through the law—”

“The law,” Szabo interrupted with a sneer on
his face. At least, Harry thought it was a sneer. With his shark’s
features, he appeared to be constantly sneering, but the tone in
his voice was evidence enough. It indicated total disgust. “Whose
law are we talking about? The law made by those in power, who want
to keep the disenfranchised beneath them? Hah, that is a
laugh.”

Before Harry could get another word out,
Szabo continued laying down the facts. “You were lucky, Goldman.
You came from a decent family with enough money, status and
education. You were born in a country where it is more than
possible to rise above your station due to intelligence and hard
work. But others are not so fortunate. They are poor or born of a
different color or do not care for the opposite sex.”

As he spoke, something inside Harry’s mind
grudgingly accepted this line of reasoning. He had been lucky, yes,
but others suffered discrimination due to them being what they
were. He remembered one person he’d briefly worked with at the
university in Portland. She was of mixed parentage, her father
Asian and her mother black, and there were those in the student
body who didn’t like what she was. It never mattered to him, but to
her it did. She transferred to another university a couple of
months after the comments began. He never heard from her again.

Silence continued while Harry tried to figure
out a way to counteract this line of reasoning. Deep down, he knew
that Szabo was right about one thing. Society as it stood right
then, at least many parts of it, wouldn’t accept him. The following
words from the man-shark, delivered with precision and accompanying
passion, underscored that feeling.

“I see that you are thinking things over.
Look in the mirror, Goldman. You do not fit. Neither does your
girlfriend, this I know. You were never part of the crowd when
younger.”

A smirk formed on his wide mouth, indicating
that he knew more than most and wanted to impart that knowledge. “I
read your history. I know that you were an outcast because of your
mind, because you are smarter than most others are. I also know
that your girlfriend was not accepted either, because of her
parents and their lifestyle, which they forced upon her. Both of
you are not accepted now, just as I am not accepted.”

“You chose to become this way.”

A faint shrug accompanied Szabo’s answer.
“True, but I must assume that you know something about my...” he
hesitated only slightly, “my past. I was not what you would call a
social person. I am better off this way.”

His voice took on a most persuasive air. “I
will point out that you, too, chose to become what you are. Join
me. Not as an enemy, no, but as an equal. You have talent, the
talent to make those who want to be special in their own right fit
in. All I ask is your loyalty.”

Of course, he would ask that. In all the mad
dictator movies, all they ever asked was for loyalty. Loyalty,
though, was often never enough. Harry didn’t like being thought of
as a freak, but at the same time, he knew damn well that if he ever
did go rogue, there would be no going back. “You do know that I’m
going to say no to all this, don’t you?” he asked.