Rise of the Transgenics by J.S. Frankel Page B

indicated that someone was
going to get their butt metaphorically kicked later on. “Fine,
we’ll settle this when we get back to headquarters. What did you
come up with?”
    The other agent swept his hand across the
area. “Hard to find anything in the snow,” Mathers stated, his
breath coming out in puffs of icy air. “We came here before, in the
summer, bagged and tagged everything we could find. If there is
anything else, it’s buried under the wreckage, and we don’t want to
alert the locals. As it is, someone might come by, and if I may,
sir, I’d suggest we don’t stay up here too long.”
    Farrell nodded his head. It seemed as though
he considered this trip up here a waste of time as well.
    “I’d like to take a look at those bones as
soon as possible,” Halsey interjected, alternately looking cold,
miserable, and scared at the sight of a cat-girl. For her part,
Anastasia ignored him, choosing to stalk around, still testing for
scents with her nose. She then bent over to examine the snow and
waded out into it, sniffing around.
    Harry glanced at her for a moment and then
turned his attention back to the plump doctor. This called for the
direct approach. Farrell seemed to want to wait in order to rip the
doctor a new one. Harry didn’t. “You ordered this?” he asked
Halsey. “Did Merton say it was okay?”
    In a split second, the doctor’s fraidy-cat
attitude vanished, replace by a smug and smarmy attitude. “He
doesn’t know. You may think you know something about this line of
research, but you’re in over your head. I studied at Vanderbilt,
interned at the Mayo Clinic, and believe me, kid, you know
nothing.”
    Once more, he had to come out with a kid
comment, but Harry decided to let it pass. A sense of betrayal ran
through him, but he held his temper and listened to the other man
rattle off his achievements. Halsey only stopped when he ran out of
breath.
    What a self-righteous jerk. Harry
decided to drop the hammer. “If you’re so smart, did you manage to
solve the matrix and turn Anastasia back into what she was when I
first met her?”
    Halsey’s superior attitude vanished, as did
his smile. “No.”
    “Who did?”
    Reluctantly, the chubby man muttered,
“You.”
    Farrell then decided to step in. He’d been
listening to the exchange, the expression on his face unreadable,
but now an angry look supplanted the impassive one.
    “You know, I was a little peeved before, but
now I’m going to pull rank. You decided to go over my head, go over
the Director’s head, and pull an agent off his regular duties just
to see if you could get in on the action, is that it?”
    Halsey started to protest, and the senior
man’s voice continued to rise as he berated the doctor, calling him
incompetent six ways from Sunday.
    Harry decided it wasn’t worth getting pissed
over. He’d already owned the doctor, and ownage was sweet. Still,
some things had to be let go, and he walked off to join Anastasia.
She stood at the edge of the forest line, sniffing the air. “Find
anything?” he asked.
    Not a word came from her at first, but the
fur on the nape of her neck stood up, and her hackles went up
slightly as well. “Something’s here,” she whispered and bent down
to sniff at the snow. “Wait.”
    With a sure hand, she dusted the top cover
off and her search revealed a print—a paw print. Harry’s heart gave
a quick jump. It looked like a cat’s paw print, but larger, as if
it was mixed with a human one. There were toe marks—six of them—and
as for the indentation, it was very shallow, as if the person was
light in bodyweight.
    Anastasia continued to check. After she’d
pushed back more of the snow, he saw a few other prints. These ones
were larger, circular, and if he didn’t know any better, they
resembled prints made by something heavy, something large. He’d
seen prints like those before in a textbook he’d read as a kid, and
they reminded him of a rhinoceros’ hoof