Fic: Blah, Blah, Meow, Meow: Part Three
There was no sign of Alec in the condo.
Not that Logan had really expected there to be; that would’ve been far too easy. So Logan fired up Virginia’s laptop and got to work cracking her password, while Max rifled through her filing cabinets. Every now and then Max would pull out a file with an interested ‘huh’ and put it on the desk. By the time Logan cracked the password, she had quite a pile; and Virginia Rossi had woken up.
Max stalked across to where they had the geneticist securely tied to a chair and stood in front of her with her arms folded. “Where’s Alec?” she said.
The geneticist laughed from behind her gag. Max inclined her head and stared at her until she shut up and then she turned to Logan. “You okay there?”
Logan nodded distractedly.
“I’ma take another look around the house. Something…doesn’t feel right. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, though.”
Max’s first foray through the condo had been fast; she’d raced from room to room at full speed, desperate to find Alec. This time she was in no hurry, searching each room slowly and thoroughly, cataloguing everything, her eyes searching high and low, her brain calculating, and…huh…Max frowned and tilted her head to one side.
The master bedroom should be bigger. Max walked out of the bedroom and surveyed its external walls. The bedroom’s back wall should go back another twelve feet. There was definitely space unaccounted for. Enough space to make a small room.
Max went back into the bedroom and pulled open Virginia’s closet. She yanked the hangers of clothes apart and then ran her sensitive fingertips over the back wall of the closet until she found a release mechanism. Once she had clicked it, the panels of the closet’s false wall slid back to reveal a small room, complete with cage.
Standing inside the cage was Alec.
“Omigod! Alec!” she rushed forward.
Alec yowled and hissed, his…tail...puffing up and whipping around furiously.
Max slammed to a stop.
“Omigod. Alec,” she said again.
Logan scrolled down the file, reading fast. Oh, this wasn’t good. Really not good at all.
Apparently, Frankie Moretti had gotten sick of having to trawl through on-line records looking for the perfect match to a client’s requirements; instead, he was having Rossi engineer live sex-toys to order. At first Rossi had experimented with regular humans, with limited success. And then, not long after the Manticore breakout, she’d lucked onto her first x-series subject and realized that they already had such diverse DNA cocktails that they were relatively easy to tweak. And no-one was going to report them missing to the authorities. Logan shut down the project summary file and began to open the individual case files, starting with the most recent, an X-5 named…Alec.
“Logan?”
Max’s voice was right beside his ear and Logan jumped. “Got something you need to take a look at,” she said.
Logan frowned. “Can it wait? I’ve just found Alec’s case file.”
“Yeah? Well I’ve just found Alec.”
Logan got to his feet. “Is he okay?”
There was a pause and then Max said, “Well. He’s feisty, I’ll give him that. Spitting and snarling and wagging his tail. Yes. That’s right, Logan. I said his tail!”
Logan blinked. And then he scanned Alec’s case file…and felt bile rising in his throat. What kind of sicko wanted a cat boy sex slave?
He tilted the monitor toward Max and watched as her spine straightened and her expression hardened as she scanned the file.
“Rossi’s got a secret room behind her closet,” Max said, turning away from the monitor and motioning Logan toward the door. “She’s keeping him in there. He doesn’t seem to like me much.”
“He’s probably reacting to your feline DNA,” Logan lowered his voice as they reached Rossi’s room. “He probably sees you as a threat coming into his territory.”
Max looked up at him, her face dismayed. “I’ll fall back,” she said, “Let you handle this.”
Logan entered the hidden room slowly with his hands held out non-threateningly before him.
“Hey, Alec,” he said. “It’s me, Logan.”
Alec stared at him with unblinking big green eyes.
He didn’t look a lot different. He didn’t have claws and he didn’t have sharp teeth (because why would you order them for your sex toy?). He didn’t have whiskers either. What he did have was elongated, pointy ears, sort of like an elf, or Spock from Star Trek, but with tufts of fur on top. And a rather impressive tail; which was twitching irritably.
“It’s okay, Alec,” Logan said soothingly. “Everything’s okay.”
Alec made a low growling noise. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Everything’s just peachy. I have a tail, Logan. I had to tear a hole in my jeans to give it some room! And I’ve got ears like Yoda and an overwhelming desire to scratch Max’s eyes out. And you…don’t smell threatening, so my stupid feline instincts have receded enough for my human brain to pick up the reins,” Alec frowned. “So to speak.”
Logan let out a sigh of relief. Alec was still Alec.
“I read your case file,” Logan said. “It looks as though she’s-”
“Amped up my feline DNA. But only certain aspects of it,” Alec held out his hands. “Look Ma, no claws,” he frowned. “I know what she’s done; I just don’t know why.”
Logan ran a hand across his chin and then decided that Alec deserved to know. “Sex pets,” he said. “Made to order. She has a buyer lined up.”
Logan watched, fascinated, as Alec’s tail puffed up to twice its previous size, and then a low growling sound started to rumble out of his chest and up his throat.
“Easy there, tiger,” Logan said.
Alec snarled.
“Sorry,” Logan stuttered. “I didn’t…that was an inappropriate word choice. I’m sorry.”
Alec paced a little in his cage and Logan kept up a string of soothing words until the tail went back to its normal size and the growling stopped.
“You okay?” Logan asked cautiously.
Alec grinned, feral and nasty. “Can I tear her throat out?”
Logan shook his head. “No. But we’ll leave her trussed up, surrounded by incriminating evidence, and then call Matt Sung.”
He approached the cage slowly and Alec tracked his every move.
“How about we get you out of here?” Logan suggested.
“The cage door needs a four digit code to unlock it,” Alec said. “If you don’t have the code those vents in the ceiling,” he pointed upward, “will release this gas she’s developed especially for knocking out Transgenics. It’s what she used to subdue me.”
“Max?” Logan said.
“On it,” she replied, from out in the bedroom.
Max entered the cage-room slowly a few minutes later. “Hey Alec,” she said softly.
Alec rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and grimaced. “Sorry about before,” he said. “My inner cat’s having a real hard time not reacting to yours.”
She nodded and turned to Logan. “Code’s 4589. You try it, I’ll go wait out there,” she looked back at Alec, her face fierce. “I told her that every time she gave us the wrong code I’d cut off one of her fingers. I almost hope she lied.”
Alec’s nose scrunched up. “Well I don’t. That stuff’s nasty. We should definitely destroy her stock of it and get rid of any records that contain the formula for it.”
To Alec’s relief, and Max’s disappointment, the code worked. Alec followed Logan out into Virginia’s bedroom, snagging a dark grey overcoat and a black pork pie hat on his way through the closet to hide his ears and tail.
Max smiled and looked way too pleased with herself.
“What?” Alec glanced behind himself. “Is my tail sticking out?”
Max shook her head. “You and Logan just came out of the closet.”
Alec glared and then stalked past Max and out into the living room where Virginia Rossi was tied to a chair.
“Well Virginia, it’s been,” he frowned, “what’s the exact opposite of ‘fun’?” He stared at her for a moment. “Anyway, see you round,” he turned to go and then paused. “Oh yeah, I forgot,” Alec swung back around and punched her in the face, and Max gasped because he didn’t pull his punch at all and a full-power punch from a Transgenic was definitely enough to kill a human.
Virginia didn’t even lose consciousness and Max looked at Alec in horror.
“She’s had me on some kind of speed and strength inhibitor. But it’s gonna wear off, right Logan? It’s only temporary?”
Logan pushed at his glasses. “I’ll have to go through the case file, but, uh. Probably.”
That seemed to be enough to reassure Alec, but the trust the younger man had in him was misplaced. The truth was, until he had a chance to read through the case file and run some tests, Logan had no idea at all just how permanent any of the changes were.
The tunnel out of Terminal City came up inside one of the sector’s shanty towns. More particularly, it came up inside a decrepit slum-shanty that the Transgenics had created specifically for the purpose of hiding the mouth of the tunnel. A group of anomalies, all of whom looked like an old woman with really bad psoriasis-complete with weeping boils, were responsible for guarding the entrance. They took it in turns to sit on an upturned fruit-packing crate in the slum-shanty’s entrance, the folds of a stinking rag curtain hanging in the doorway behind them. The sight of them tended to put the humans off looking too closely.
“Hilda,” Alec nodded to today’s guard as he followed Logan and Max past her and into the tunnel. His ears were flat and his tail was twitching and the scents as they moved into the tunnel were overwhelming. Hilda had a lot of toad and slug in her cocktail and his inner cat didn’t particularly like it, but it wasn’t too interested. The tunnel was guarded at regular intervals by a whole bunch of Dix’s people, and they had a lot of gopher in their cocktails. Alec’s inner cat wanted to hunt them and he was having a lot of trouble supressing the instinct. By the time they came up inside Terminal City, Alec’s face was shiny with sweat, the fur of his tail was standing on end and the miasma of scents was becoming overwhelming. When they reached the command center in HQ, Dix, Luke, Mole and Joshua converged on them, welcoming Alec back, asking him where he’d been and…Alec was suddenly too hot. He stripped off the coat and the hat and Mole gasped around the cigar in his mouth.
“Alec,” Joshua pointed at his tail. “Alec cat boy.”
It was…just…too much. Alec backed away, his tail puffed up, his shoulders tensed and a low, threatening rumbling began to shake its way out of his chest.
“Alec,” Max took a step toward him and Alec hissed at her.
And then he ran.
He wasn’t X-5 fast, but Alec was fast enough. Okay, it probably helped that no-one had actually followed him, but still.
The building that housed HQ had been a Convention Center, pre-pulse, and had an industrial kitchen, as well as a gym and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Alec tore out of the command center and took a right, away from the popular, high-traffic areas of HQ, away from the housing area to the left, and toward the old department store warehouse on the other side.
At Manticore, Alec and his cohort had been taught that people very rarely looked up and that given their own enhanced capacity to jump high, a vertical exit strategy was often a sensible tactic. Alec had always been fond of heights; Biggs had enjoyed them too. And given how often Alec had found Max chilling on top of the Space Needle, he figured that it might be a fairly general X-5 trait. Now he wondered if it might not have something to do with their feline DNA, because his inner cat was telling him pretty damn adamantly that it wanted to go up.
Alec came to a stop in a section of the warehouse that had an upper level of loft-style storage. Whatever Virginia had done to him was affecting his ability to jump, so Alec used the ladder to climb up into the loft and then detached it and pushed it to the ground. He backed himself against the loft wall and then lay down and curled himself into a ball, his nose on his tail.
<
| NEXT>
>
Back to Masterpost