Revolution (5 page)

With a sigh and an exaggerated shrug of her
shoulders, Anastasia went over to the closet. It held a variety of
linens, blankets and pillows. She took out three blankets.
Returning to the couch, she tossed one at Istvan and the other at
Harry. Without another word, she sat down, pulled the blanket over
her and put her head down.

After wrapping himself up in the blanket,
Istvan took a spot on the floor and soon passed out, snoring
loudly. Anastasia, though, raised her head after he nodded off and
whispered to Harry, “Something stinks here. Istvan found us too
easily. I don’t trust him.”

Harry had to agree. “You think he’s a
spy?”

“If he isn’t, you can call me Miss Kitty for
the rest of the year,” she said and cracked a tiny smile.

“You
are
serious,” Harry answered,
trying not to laugh. All the same, though, things were just a
little too convenient. Cocking his head to one side, he strained
his ears to catch any unusual sounds from outside, but heard
nothing save the night insects and a few mice scratching their way
over the ground.

“Let’s get some rest,” Anastasia said.

She leaned against him. Soon, he heard her
quiet, rhythmical breathing. The rhythm of her breathing carried
over to him and he began to nod off. A second before he did, he
hoped that his girlfriend’s prediction wouldn’t turn out to be
true.

“Hey, get up, we got company.”

Anastasia’s voice, urgent and hoarse, broke
into Harry’s stay within the void known as sleep and he awoke,
springing off the couch. “What kind of company?” he asked, noticing
that her hair stood up on the nape of her neck. She began to growl,
a low sound that reverberated across the room.

“The worst kind,” she answered and sniffed
the air. “This one’s big, very big.”

In a flash, Harry thought about his dream. It
seemed that his nightmare was about to manifest itself in reality.
Both agents turned around at the warning with alarmed looks on
their faces. “What is it?” asked the taller man.

“Something’s coming,” answered Harry, baring
his claws. “Get ready.”

While Anastasia also bared her claws and
settled into a fighting stance, the agents drew their weapons and
took the safeties off. The taller agent stepped back from the door
a few paces while the shorter agent kept watch at the rear window.
“I got nothing,” the latter man said. “You see anything?”

“Nothing here,” the taller man said.

Istvan woke up suddenly and started to
tremble. “I smell something. It is Szabo. He is here.”

Anastasia turned on him, hissing out, “You
set us up!”

“No, no, I did not,” Istvan cried and
scuttled over to hide in the corner near the shower area. “He knows
about us, he knows!”

A loud growl that sounded like a bear crossed
with a demon from hell sounded from outside. The growl quickly
turned into a bellow that made the windows shake. Anastasia took
two steps backwards and then whirled around to warn the agents. “I
smell him, he’s coming through the front door!” she cried. “Get
ready!”

Her warning wasn’t enough, though, as the
door burst inward and a monster, right out of Harry’s dream, stood
in the aperture. Clad in a pair of khaki-colored trousers and a
ripped up lumberjack’s shirt, at roughly six and a half feet in
height, it had the body of a bear, furry and hyper-muscular.
However, the head resembled a shark’s, with a long snout,
grayish-blue skin, and teeth that had to be at least three inches
in length if not more.

And were those gills on his neck? They looked
like gills, pulsating in and out. Massive hands ending in long
claws completed the picture of a manufactured killing machine.

“Sweet Jesus,” the tall agent croaked out and
got off three shots. They hit the bear-shark thing dead center in
its chest. It would have killed any human, but this thing couldn’t
be considered anything remotely human, and the bullets didn’t slow
it down for a second. It lunged at the agent’s midriff, twisted its
neck and fastened its jaws around his waist. With a sharp snapping
sound of teeth meeting teeth, it bit him in half. The force of the
bite was so powerful that the agent’s body exploded and blood and
entrails showered everything and everyone in the room.

“Shoot him!” Harry yelled out.

The shorter agent took aim and blew six holes
in the shark man’s torso. More blood sprayed out and he staggered,
but didn’t go down. Instead, he let out another fearsome bellow and
charged the man, picked him up in his massive arms and squeezed. A
loud crack resounded through the room and the agent’s head
lolled.

With a smile, the bear-shark tossed the
corpse away and turned his head in Istvan’s direction. With a shock
that wasn’t really a shock, the thing’s wounds healed in the blink
of an eye.

“You, you little traitor, I thought that I
would find you here, and I was right.” The monster’s accent sounded
vaguely Russian... but not. Accent or no, every word carried menace
and he swiveled his stare, empty and dead, to Harry. “My name is
Szabo. Little men are nothing. You, you are next,” he said.

Szabo... the name wasn’t Russian, but Harry
wasn’t concentrating on that at all. As the monster spoke, Harry
froze as a sense of dread enveloped him. Throat suddenly dry, he
swallowed and found that he had no saliva in his mouth. The old
memories of him getting punked in grade school and junior high
years back came through and rooted him to the floor. In situations
like this, it was normal to be scared. His instincts told him to
run, to find somewhere safe, but his mind told him to stay and face
down his fear. Both ideas jockeyed for supremacy and he wasn’t sure
which would win.

However, if he was scared, then Anastasia was
the exact opposite, as she spread her arms wide and issued her
challenge. “Come and get some,” she yelled.

With a shout of rage that shook the walls,
Szabo charged, jaws wide open, and Harry’s instincts of
self-defense kicked in. He jumped aside at the last second, but
twisted around and stuck out his leg. Szabo tripped and sprawled on
the floor. Anastasia seized that moment to leap onto his back and
slashed away at his head. “You try to mess with us, this is what
happens!” she cried.

The monster roared while his blood jetted
into the air, but he didn’t seem to be seriously hurt. With a
lightning-fast move, he rolled over while grabbing onto Anastasia’s
tail and proceeded to toss her across the room.

The sight of his girlfriend being assaulted
awoke Harry’s courage and he charged. “Take me on!” he screamed and
lashed out with a right hook that actually staggered the
man-shark.

“You hit back... good,” Szabo said, rubbing
his snout. “Try again.”

Evading the first slashes, Harry bore in
close. He used his own claws to rake Szabo’s face, all the while
ducking and weaving in order to avoid the snapping jaws. His
comeback continued until the monster clubbed him on the back of his
head. Stars exploded in Harry’s field of view and shock paralyzed
his system.

In a mocking voice, Szabo asked, “Is that the
best that you can do?”

Harry felt the other man-thing lift him. A
second later, the air rushed by and the window rushed forward.
Sailing through it, he landed on the grass in a shower of glass and
his own blood.

“Damn it,” he muttered. After getting to his
feet, he unsteadily ran inside to find Anastasia still clawing and
slashing at the enemy for all she was worth. Drawing in a deep
breath, Harry joined in. Pain and rage helped fuel his assault and
he cut and chopped at the much larger man-thing. Szabo replied with
swipes of his own. Soon the air became thick with the smell of
sweat, blood and fur.

“Enough of this,” Szabo growled and with a
mighty backhand, knocked Anastasia against the far wall, where she
collapsed in a heap. He turned around and grabbed Harry by the
throat. The man-thing’s strength was incredible. Harry slashed the
monster’s forearms, kicked and squirmed, but no matter what he did,
he couldn’t break the hold.

“You are less than nothing.” Szabo smiled,
and after practically crushing his larynx, tossed him to land on
top of Anastasia. He then took off through the door and into the
night with an astonishing burst of speed.

“You’d better get off me,” Anastasia said
with a groan.

His body screaming with pain and his breath
coming out painfully, Harry fell to the floor, trying to calm the
hammering in his chest. That thing had scared the ever-loving hell
out of him. Szabo was truly a nightmare come true. “Are you all
right?” he rasped. That monster had almost crushed his throat. He
could have—but didn’t.

She panted out, “I’ll make it, but this is
really going to hurt in the morning.”

With another painful groan, she got to her
feet and wended her way over to the couch, where she collapsed in a
heap. Harry wearily took his place next to her, noticed that her
body had already begun to heal and also noted the same thing
happening to him. At the same time, though, he cursed himself for
hesitating. Seconds counted, and he realized that hesitation could
be costly.

Perhaps Anastasia sensed his uncertainty and
fear and perhaps not. With a gentle, loving hand, she patted him on
the shoulder. “You did fine,” she said, casting her gaze to the
ground. “He’s... way too much for me.”

It was a rather astonishing admission on her
part. She’d never backed down from any challenge before, never
admitted defeat. Perhaps this was one adversary she couldn’t fight
against... and Harry had to own up and say the same. “Yeah, he’s
got the edge in strength, but not in speed. We have to work
together. We can take him.”

Anastasia lifted her head and nodded. “Let’s
figure that out another day.”

Her gaze then shifted from one of softness to
one of steel when it locked on Istvan. He hadn’t moved from his
position, but when he saw her face, he started to whimper once more
and curled up into a ball. “Don’t you try that
I’m afraid don’t
hurt me
crap on me,” Anastasia said.

She got off the sofa and with an iron hand,
dragged him over to the couch. There she slung him onto the
cushions like a student tossing his backpack down after a hard day
at school. “We heard what Szabo told you. He called you a traitor.
If you don’t want to end up like those two agents,” she pointed at
their remains, “then you’d better start talking, and you’d better
start now.”

Istvan gulped and nodded, fearfully looking
around him. “I will tell you,” he said in the faintest of all
voices, “but he will come back for me. He wants me. He wants this
man,” he pointed to Harry, “and he wants to kill. I cannot fight
him. I cannot win, and I cannot escape what I am.”

A second later, he dissolved into tears and
his body shook uncontrollably. While he cried, Harry took one of
the dead agent’s cellphones and dialed the number for FBI
headquarters. A minute later, he hung up and turned to Istvan. “I
just called the FBI. An agent—his name is Farrell—is going to be
here as soon as he can. If you have anything to tell us, then you’d
better start now. Stop crying, or else we’ll do this on our own and
leave you—”

The threat got through to Istvan, for he
stopped crying and got on his knees as if begging for mercy. “No,
please do not leave me. I will tell you what I know.”

Anastasia crossed her arms over her chest in
the manner of a detective during an interrogation. “Then start
talking. We’ll listen.”

“It is true,” Istvan said, still sniveling and wiping
the tears from his eyes. “I am a traitor, but not to you. I am
against that thing which came here.”

Apparently, the idea of the word traitor
didn’t make Anastasia feel all warm and fuzzy, as her eyes bugged
out and she made a grab for Istvan. Harry did his best to restrain
her, but she shook him off, saying to Istvan, “You little punk,
don’t tell me you were actually working for him!”

“I was.”

Anastasia continued to struggle and Harry
grabbed her again. Istvan backed up against the wall, crying that
he was innocent. “Not here, not now,” Harry cautioned. “We need to
talk to him.”

She calmed down, Istvan calmed down and soon
the details emerged. Snatched by Grushenko’s men slightly over a
year before, he was transformed into a pig. “He wanted to use
me—Grushenko did—as a way of testing drugs as well as reversing the
process. I knew that he was ill. He had cancer and needed someone
who could not only regenerate, but also not contract the disease. I
am that person.”

“Why did he choose you?” Anastasia wanted to
know.

“Pigs,” Harry supplied, recalling his basic
knowledge about medicine. “They react to human diseases pretty much
the same way humans do. Their organs are arranged almost the same
way as a human’s are.”

An angry cough came their way. Istvan’s face
was a study in terror and fear, but when he spoke, it was with
total loathing. “Yes, that is right. I was the perfect subject,” he
said. “Once they transformed me, they conducted more experiments. I
do not have powers and I am not strong, but Grushenko wanted me
around. He kept me chained up like any other animal. I am not a pet
and I am not a guinea pig.”

His sniffles had stopped, but his lower lip
quivered something awful. “I did not want to be a test subject for
Grushenko. I stayed in cell next to Szabo and one day when guard is
not around, Szabo whisper to me,
I will help you if you help
me
and I say
yes.
What choice did I have? I did not know
his plan then.”

Harry and Anastasia exchanged glances.
Silence hung in the air until Harry took the lead. “What plan are
we talking about?”

In a reply that both perplexed as well as
infuriated Harry, Istvan said, “I am not sure.” His brow furrowed
in concentration. “I only hear things between Grushenko, other
scientists there, and sometimes Grushenko talks on the telephone.
It had something to do with transposing genes. I do not understand
the science. I was geography major in university.”