Revolution (27 page)

With a hoarse cry of rage, Harry leaped to
his feet, claws out and adrenaline flowing through his body. “Bring
it!” he yelled.

Kulakov obliged him by starting forward,
hands moving in their circular pattern—the same pattern. Right,
left, thrust, chop from the right hand to the left, then the
opposite... the thing never varied its movements. Harry did, though
and evaded each shot while slashing off an arm at a time.

The monster howled in pain. Going on the
offensive, Harry cut and chopped at his enemy, driving him back to
the edge of the cliff. A look of disbelief appeared in Kulakov’s
eyes. He was losing, perhaps for the first time in his life, and he
knew it. “Please,” he said, pleading for his life. His manner was
piteous to the nth degree. “Please... no.”

A scream erupted from his lips as he tripped
on a rock and fell over the side. Harry ran to catch him. This
thing didn’t deserve to die, not yet. It needed to be put on public
display for everyone to spit on. He grabbed on to the blob’s
remaining arm. “You don’t deserve to live.”

“You don’t deserve to be as you are,” Kulakov
gasped. “But I will take your assistance...”

His voice abruptly trailed off. His body
seemed to shift, become looser somehow and he had just enough time
to let out one word. “Oh...”

A second later, his arm came free from his
body. With a terrible scream, he plummeted to the ground below.
Harry couldn’t see him, but he heard something go splat.

Tired and in pain, he tossed the arm over the
side of the cliff. “Istvan,” he whispered.

Hurriedly, he made his way back to the
complex. From there, he rode the elevator down to the bottom.
Emerging in a sea of flames, he hunted for the little pig-man, but
there was no sign of him. The screaming had also stopped from
behind the metal door. Knowing that he had to leave yet not wanting
to, he ran for his life up the stairs and out into the open.
Billowing smoke swirled around him as he slammed the door shut.

“Anastasia!” he yelled out. “Where are
you?”

“Here,” she replied. “Take a left around the
corner of the building!”

“I’m coming.”

Sniffing the air, he tried to get Istvan’s
scent, but couldn’t catch even a faint whiff. Perhaps he’d made his
escape. Harry wanted to believe that he had and wished the little
man well. He’d had no choice in all of this. In fact, none of them
had gotten the chance to lead a normal life. Only he had, and he’d
made the choice to be with Anastasia and be like her. It wasn’t
something he’d regretted.

As he turned a corner, he found Anastasia
bent over Martuska’s body. Anastasia sported numerous cuts and
slashes on her face and body, but still stood. Martuska didn’t. She
wouldn’t be flying the friendly skies ever again. Feathers littered
the ground and a pool of blood had already begun to spread from
under her corpse.

“Birds can fly,” Anastasia said and she
sounded spent. With a grunt of pain, she sat down and held her head
in her hands. “They’re not so good at fighting on land.”

Harry slumped down beside her. “Are you going
to be okay?”

It wasn’t the smartest question to ask, but
it had to be. As for him, he figured on having nightmares for a
month, but as for Anastasia...

“Yeah, I’ll live,” she said, rolling her neck
around her shoulders. The cuts and slashes on her body had already
begun to heal. “It’s just all this... all this death... I’m tired
of it.”

A look of anguish crept over her face. “All I
ever wanted was to be normal. Now I can’t be. I’m stuck this
way.”

Harry put his hand around her shoulder. “Is
it so bad?”

The look of anguish gave way to one of
acceptance and she offered a shrug. “If you’re with me, then that’s
enough. I can put up with the stares and the comments and all the
other crap if you can.”

Thinking about it, Harry wondered if Szabo
had been so wrong. He’d wanted to build a society away from the
mainstream, build his world and make it a place where others like
him could live and walk around free. It wasn’t a bad idea, but his
way of doing it—through murder and terror—had been all wrong from
the start. And he’d never realized it. Maybe he hadn’t cared.

As for Kulakov, he’d been mad from the start.
Wanting to reshape human evolution, which meant killing most of the
human race—no, Harry had not allowed that to happen and neither had
Anastasia.

A sudden thought speared Harry’s mind. It was
something very simple, very basic and yet fundamental to every
human being out there. From now on, he decided that he’d walk
around in the sun whenever he pleased. He’d go where he wanted, buy
whatever he liked and do what was necessary to be the same as
everyone else. In his mind, he
was
just like everyone else,
only furrier.

Anastasia’s hand caressing his face broke his
train of thought. He turned and locked eyes with her. “How about
you?” she asked. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” he said as he tiredly got to his
feet. He reached down to pull her up with him. “I think we’re going
to be fine.”

A sound from over the horizon broke through.
It was a helicopter. “Company’s coming. It has to be Farrell.”

He took his girlfriend’s hand in his. “Let’s
go home.”

The debriefing, short and sweet, took place on the
airplane back to the States. Upon boarding, Harry sank into a seat,
feeling every bone ache. His muscles sent stabs of pain to spots he
didn’t know existed. Enhanced healing powers or not, he could still
be injured, and getting injured hurt.

Anastasia plopped down beside him. She gave
him a nod as if to say
I know how much pain you’re in.
A
slight groan came from her as she shifted around to a more
comfortable position.

Farrell took a seat across the aisle and
gingerly sat, favoring his bad arm. “I thought you said the
Russians shut you out,” Anastasia said.

“Initially they did,” he replied. “However, a
friend came forward with a little information, and they changed
their minds.”

“What friend are we talking about?”

Farrell chuckled. “It was Morozoff. He said
that he had detailed files on every single dirty deal the Kremlin
has done for the last twenty years.”

Astonished, Harry asked, “He bluffed
them?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Farrell turned to
Anastasia and added, “Morozoff said that he owed it to you. It
wasn’t much, but that was all he had.”

She remained silent, but gave a tiny smile
and returned the nod. Farrell sank back into his seat and closed
his eyes. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m up for a
vacation.”

Vacation... yeah, right, Harry thought. If he
and Anastasia went anywhere outside the cabin, where would they go
and what would they do? Right now, he wasn’t thinking about
relaxing on a beach sipping Coke or an alcoholic beverage. He was
too busy thinking about the events of the last hour, and like a
horror movie, the worst parts replayed themselves endlessly in his
mind. The gurgling sound that Szabo had made after Harry had sunk
his claws into his neck. The horrific shrieks that the other
enhanced had made as the fire consumed them.

Finally, he remembered the look of utter
terror on Kulakov’s face as he plummeted to his death from the top
of the peak. Like a time-loop, the events came back in living
color. It was a sure bet that he’d have nightmares for a while.
However, the immediate danger was over. The enemy, for now, had
been defeated. Life would continue.

“Did you manage to get any information?”
asked Farrell, breaking the spell. He leaned forward in his seat
and waited with an expectant look on his face.

“What did...” Harry blinked. “What was
that?”

“Information,” Farrell repeated in a testy
tone. It seemed that he needed the information yesterday. “I’m
asking you if you found anything.”

“No,” Anastasia cut in. “There was nothing.
It’s all gone.”

Farrell grunted as if he somehow disapproved
of them getting out of the laboratory alive and intact, but not
bringing back the secrets of the universe. He twiddled his fingers
and after blowing out a deep breath, offered, “Well, at least
you’re both okay. That’s something.”

That had to be the understatement of the
year, Harry reflected. To him, it was a big something. An even
bigger something—rather, some
one
—sat beside him. Seeing
Anastasia alive after the conflict had sent a huge wave of relief
through him.

On the other hand, they hadn’t found a trace
of Istvan. After the battles with Szabo and Kulakov and after the
fire and the subsequent explosion, it seemed that all traces of his
existence had been wiped out.

As they waited for the helicopter to arrive,
Anastasia said with a wistful tone in her voice, “I want to believe
he’s still alive. He helped us so much.”

Harry also wanted to believe the little man
had survived. Maybe one day he’d turn up.

The sounds of the helicopter grew louder.
Before it landed, Anastasia ran through the area, testing the air
with her nose. At one point, she even dropped to all fours and
sniffed at the sparse grass. “You smell anything?” Harry asked.

She got to her feet and shook her head. “No,
there’s too much smoke and blood in the air. If his body had been
burned, I’d have smelled it. There’s nothing.”

Her statement sent a wave of loss through
him. Istvan hadn’t asked for any of this to happen to him. Like
many of the others, he’d been an unwilling pawn, used for the
amusement of the sick minds out there, along with their evil plots.
They had paid, but Harry still held out hope that the little man
had somehow made it through.

Harry snapped back to the present as Farrell
left off the questioning and tilted his head back. Soon, he fell ,
and Anastasia took Harry’s hand and led him to another seat. “It’s
a little more private here,” she said.

There were only seven rows on the plane, but
whatever. “What is it?” he asked.

She bit her lip. “It’s just us, for now.”

“Yeah, it is.”

With the disappearance and probable death of
Istvan, the destruction of all the labs and the deaths of Szabo and
Kulakov, the mastermind of all this insanity, it seemed as though
there were no others like them, friend or foe.

Yet, something the monkey-man had said at the
farmhouse, something about... stasis chambers. Was it possible
others were gestating in private facilities? He didn’t want to
believe it. Although right now, anything was possible.

That, however, could wait. He’d experienced
the feeling of loss once, when his parents died. He’d experienced
it once more, more painfully, when Anastasia was kidnapped. He did
not want to lose her again, now or ever.

“If it’s going to be us from now on, should
we make it more permanent?” asked Anastasia, her eyes glowing.

Permanent... as in... “Do you mean, uh, you
want to get married?”

“You asked me before. Back then, I was on the
fence. I’m not now, and I always wanted kittens.”

Her reply came out so deadpan he couldn’t
hold back his laughter. “Well, I was thinking the same thing.”

“Then kiss me now and seal the deal.”

A second later, they did just that and held
each other until they fell asleep. The rest of their flight was
uneventful, and oddly enough, Harry didn’t dream.

Upon their arrival back in the States, they
stood in the private hangar, and Farrell cautioned them to be
careful. He’d be speaking to the director of the FBI soon enough
along with meeting the President after that. “Remember, this has to
remain quiet,” he said.

Although Harry felt jet-lagged and he needed
to take a shower in the worst way, Farrell’s words hit home. The
shower could wait and so could everything else. Another more
pressing matter needed to be dealt with, and it had to be dealt
with right now. What Anastasia had said on the airplane—them being
the only two of their kind—it couldn’t wait. “Call for a press
conference,” he said. “Do it now.”

Farrell’s eyes bulged. “Kid, you don’t know
what you’re doing.”

Even Anastasia seemed surprised. “Yeah, I’m
going to echo what the man in black said. What
are
you
doing, boyfriend?”

Harry had been thinking about this for a long
time. It was time to end this whole veil of secrecy. He didn’t want
to spend the rest of his life in a cabin, no matter how comfortable
it was. It also had nothing to do with his love for research. That
would always be part of his life. There was no way he’d give it up
now.

However, the other things that human beings
took for granted, the ability to get up and move wherever they
pleased, that was something that had been denied to Anastasia for
the longest time, and it was something he’d only experienced
recently. No one else should have to suffer just because they
looked somewhat different from the norm. The more he thought about
it, the more he realized that the norm was what society dictated,
and right now, he didn’t feel like being dictated to by anyone.

“Agent Farrell, look out there.” He pointed
at the window. A stream of people off in the distance walked
through the airport terminal. They looked to be happy, chatting
with their friends, their families and their children. “What do you
see?”

Farrell’s face got tight. “I see people
walking around. They’re going places—”

“Right, they’re going places,” Harry
interrupted and he tapped the glass for emphasis. “They can go
wherever they want. We can’t. They can walk into a shop without
someone staring at them. We can’t. They can get married and go to
school and watch movies in theaters if they want.”

“We can’t,” Anastasia supplied.

Creases of frustration knifed their way onto
Farrell’s already lean face. “Kid, the FBI has bent over backwards
to help you. We’ve given you your labs and research. We’ve given
you whatever you wanted—”