Halfkinds Volume 1: Contact (5 page)

“This is Alex,” Agent Leons says. 
“Age is about twenty one.  He’s one of the two who didn’t have a journal.  The
horn is a dead giveaway that he must be part rhino.  Judging from this mug, if
Oscar isn’t the muscle, he definitely is.  Good luck trying to take this
bastard down.  Let’s go on to the next one.”

This creature is the strangest
looking so far.  He has feathers, for starters, shiny brown ones, along with a
beak and wings as limbs.  I do see human fingers extending to the tips of
them.  His eyes are globular and very noticeable.  He’s wearing a jacket and
pants, yet coming out from the bottom aren’t feet, but talons.

“The biologists can’t really
figure out what kind of bird he got his traits from, but most likely it’s a Golden
Eagle, the only true intelligent bird out there,” Agent Leons says.  “It’s
pretty indistinguishable, especially with the human traits mixed in there. 
What we do know is that he’s the same age as Alex, just a few months younger. 
He’s also another one without a journal, so it’s hard to put a finger on what
he’s like.”

“What’s his name?”

“Lombardi.  I call him the ugly
one.  On to the next.”

This one is the most human
looking.  Its posture is hunched over a bit, and it’s a lot hairier than a
human.  Its nose is flattened and there is a long gaping mouth under it.  It
has long, styled hair, and it’s wearing short shorts and a pink tee shirt.

“At first we thought this one was
human, but later we figured she was part chimp.  And yes, you heard right,
that’s a girl.  I guess you could tell from her attire.  She had a journal and
from what we read, she’s a pure technical ace.”

“How do you know?”

“We found a lot of device manuals,
blueprints, and hacking files in her living quarters.  Schematics and some
unassembled machines.  It seems whatever she got her hands on, she took time to
understand how it worked.  She’s probably the group’s mechanic and genius.  Her
name is Candy and her age is twenty.”

“Candy?  Seems kind of an odd
choice for a name.”

“Haven’t you heard?  Her mom was a
hooker.”

Agent Leons presses the button to
move onto the next image.  This being is quite different from the other one. 
This one is hideous.  His skin is a dark green, almost mud colored, and scaly. 
His eyes are serpent like, bugging out of his head.  Sharp teeth burst past his
upper lip, overlapping his bottom one.  His hands are large and scabby like the
rest of his body and each finger has large claws on them.  He is the third
biggest after Oscar and Alex.

“This is Curtis.  He’s obviously
reptile, so we’re thinking he’s bred from a crocodile.  We’re guessing he’s about
twenty.  Unfortunately, he didn’t have a journal, so we’re not sure how he fits
in with the family.  I theorize that if he does have a role, it’s not good.”

I fixate on his sharp teeth and
leathery skin.  It sends chills down my spine.  Next to the rhino halfkind,
he’ll be the hardest to take down.

The next hologram image has two
halfkinds in it.  The first one looks very similar to Tiago, but leaner,
skinnier, and with spots.  His fur is yellow instead of orange.  He also has a
large yellow tail, also spotted.  The other one has smoother looking skin,
though I could see some short hairs on it.  It’s black and white, and has a
large pink snout for a nose.  It’s also bigger, kind of obese like the half
bear that Agent Leons showed me earlier.

“Meet Ace, the half cheetah, and
Maddie, the half cow.  Each one of them idolizes a different older brother. 
Ace wants to be like Tiago, Maddie wants to be like Oscar.  Oh, and if you
couldn’t tell by her name, Maddie is female.  And now we come to the last two. 
Both of them are in their late teens.”

Agent Leons moves to the next
hologram and I see two catlike beings.  The first one is has orange fur, its
body type is lean and well defined.  He has whiskers and hypnotizing cat eyes. 
His fur covers his whole body and his ears point up.  He’s bipedal like all the
others.

His counterpart is similar to him,
except everything is more delicate, feminine.  She is the only one who I could
tell was a girl off the bat.  Her eyes standout since they are so enormous, and
her face is thin and soft looking.  She has a long tail that sticks out of her
clothing.  Her fur isn’t as long as her brothers, and while she did have the
cat ears, she also has long, silky human hair on her head.  In a strange way,
she is very beautiful, alluring almost.

“These are the twins, Iris and Isaac,”
Agent Leons said.  “They’re part cat, and probably about seventeen.  And that’s
all we know about them really.  They didn’t have a journal or many personal
effects.”

Agent Leons eyes Iris perversely.

“But, man, too bad that one is a
cat abomination,” he says.  “In a weird way, she looks pretty good.”

I imaginarily roll my eyes at his
comments.  “What can you tell me about the one who died, Leonard?”

“Not a lot, only that he loved his
mother very much.”

“And the detective just shot at
him?”

“No, Leonard attacked first with a
kitchen knife.”

“He was hostile?”

“It seems so.”

“What is my mission exactly?”

“You are to assist in the hunting
and termination of these eleven halfkinds.”

“Why?”

“It’s an order from the Council
via the United Species Alliance.”

“Seems like a pretty shady order. 
I’m not a hired assassin.”

“Well, you’re not.  You’re a
soldier.  And soldiers do what they’re told.”

“They think for themselves, too.”

Agent Leons looks to the ground
and shakes his head.

“Look, Simon,” he says.  “I don’t
decide the orders, but this is one from the top.  You already know how much a
taboo interspecies relations are.  If word got out that these things exist, it’ll
be chaos.  It’ll be opening a can of worms that will lead to God knows what. 
People, animals will take this as another accident, like what happened a few
hundred years ago.  Suspicion and fear will ravage the streets.  These things
are atrocities and their very existence shouldn’t even be put into light.  If
this interspecies breeding begins, within a few generations people will wonder
exactly what it means to be human.  And it’s not the way Mother Nature intended
it to be.”

He takes another sip from his cup.

“Messing with genetics,” he
continues, “playing God, it’s not our role.  If our ancestors had only known
the repercussions of all this experimenting, then we’d still be on the top,
instead of sharing it with all these others animals.  But here we are again,
put face to face with an evolutionary crisis.  It’s not only the Human Council
that wants this done, it’s been decided among all the species councils that
these things need to be put out because of the threat they bring to all life,
for future generations.  This time, we have to put a stop to this before it can
even begin.”

He puts his cup down.

“Goddamn, think of all the shit us
humans could’ve done if we hadn’t messed around, if these animals never got
smart.  We could’ve been walking around this planet like gods, dominating the
world with all the advances we would’ve made the past few hundreds of years.  I
can’t even imagine all the cool shit that’d we’d be playing with right now. 
But that stuff never happened.  We had the plans, but once the animals were as
smart as us, the plans were put on hold.  Now we’re stuck in a loop of politics
and ever increasing shit.”

He looks me in the eye and moves
in closer.  His face changes from business to a more relaxed expression.  A
slick smile flashes, like one a used hovercar salesmen would have.  The
pressure I feel from him makes me uncomfortable.

“This is from the top,” he says. 
“If you do this, the Council, hell the United Species Alliance, won’t forget
it.”

He’s right.  I don’t want to let
down either group and the credits they would pay me would be pretty nice.  With
a direct order like this, I might be the one giving out briefings in the
future.

“All right, I’ll do it then.”

“Good.  Follow me and I’ll
introduce you to your team.”

“Team?  I normally work with
people I know.”

“Well this isn’t a normal case.”

November 15, 3040 11:21 AM

When we woke up this morning, we
discovered that Leonard had gone missing.  I remember earlier seeing him asleep
next to us on the dingy ground of this abandoned building, and then
mysteriously, he was gone.

We’re not sure where he snuck off
to, but Tiago has a good idea.  He knew how much Leonard loved mother, we all
did.  We remembered how outraged Leonard was when we left so hastily, that we
didn’t even give her a proper burial.  Tiago thinks that Leonard went back home
to let her rest peacefully.

I personally didn’t want to leave
mother rotting away in that house either, but things happened so fast, and we
were afraid because mother had told us so much about how the outside world
would persecute us.  When the others said that someone could stop by the house
within a day or two, I was petrified.  If we are discovered, they’ll kill or
capture us for their experiments, like mother warned us.  I don’t want to die. 
That’s why I agreed with the others to leave so quickly.

But Leonard, I could tell that he
didn’t want to.  He said nothing, but his face gave it away.  When Leonard was
sad, his upper lip would tremble a little, and his large, black eyes would
blink rapidly.  I saw both of those things happen the moment we left home.

It was hard for him.  It was hard
for all of us.  I didn’t sneak out like Maddie or Lombardi did, so that house
was the only place I knew for seventeen years.  Mother kept us in a very
sheltered existence.  She let us go on the infospace to learn about the
civilization around us, but it wasn’t tangible.  We couldn’t interact with it
physically.

From what she told us, I figured
the world wasn’t a nice place to live in.  But the idea she reinforced most
often was how all of them, humans, dogs, gorillas, pigs, all of the animals,
would be against us.  We were different, too different for a world like this.

I didn’t want to believe her, but
who else was there to believe?

“He should be returning at any moment,”
Tiago says.  He had sent Ace to go back to the house, to see if Leonard was
there.  Ace was eager to help out and he is the best equipped to scout the
area, even in broad daylight.  He’s part cheetah, meaning he runs the fastest
of all of us, and the paws he has help him tread lightly.  He boasts about his
prowess, how he’s so good he could run circles in broad daylight.  It’s not
something I would do, but his cheetah ancestry also means he’s not that smart.

“Do you think Leonard really went
back home?” I ask Isaac, my twin brother.

Isaac twitches his nose and his
whiskers shake.  “I don’t know Iris, but it seems pretty likely.  He was the
closest to mom.  Remember how much she used to baby him?  He always was her
favorite.”

Isaac speaks in the past tense and
it irks me a little.  Mother is dead, and we now have to talk about her as a
memory, not someone in the present.  It makes me sad.  I wasn’t as close to her
as Leonard, but she was still my mother.  She took care of me and my brothers
and sisters, and it’s something I couldn’t shake in just a week.

I twitch my nose and sniffle a
bit.  I try to prevent the tears from coming out of my eyes, but in doing so I
let out a faint sigh.  Isaac senses my sadness.

“Are you okay?” he asks me.  Isaac
is the one I am closest to, he is my twin after all.  He is usually my
confidant and can sense my emotions better than any of my other siblings.  He’s
earnest and on good terms with the rest of the family, but they usually refer
to us as one entity.  They say it must be a cat thing, that we stick to our own
kind.  I think it’s because Isaac understands me, and I understand him.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I say.

“You’re sad about mom, aren’t
you?” he asks.

“Yeah.  I mean, who isn’t.”

“Tiago for one.”

Since mother had died, Tiago
quickly took his place as the leader.  Throughout the week, he was the one who
had been giving orders and telling us how to ration our supplies.  He was also
the one who commanded Ace to search for Leonard.

I can’t imagine how it must be to
have the weight of ten other siblings on your shoulders.  Isaac thinks that in
the last few days, Tiago has come off way too cold, especially the way he
handled us leaving in the first place.  I could tell Isaac disagreed with how
we left mother and the house so suddenly.  It seemed wrong to leave her corpse
to rot.  He wanted to punch Tiago in the face.

But I know what we did was for the
greater good.  Tiago was thinking rationally.  It was too dangerous to stay in
one place, and Tiago had to do what he could to protect us.  Sometimes the best
decision isn’t always the most popular one.

Tiago has also been discussing
with our second oldest brother, Oscar, on what our next move should be.  It’s
odd that they are working together, they’ve never really seen eye to eye on
anything.  One is a softy, one is as hard as a rock.  I guess to formulate a
plan, you need to hear both sides.

We can’t hide in this warehouse
forever and our supplies are slowly dwindling.  The younger ones, like me and Isaac,
have to rely on their leadership in order to get through this.

I myself am scared of what the
future holds, but I’ve always been afraid.  What kind of future could I ever
possibly have?  We have no home anymore and we can’t bounce from place to place
forever.  Even worse, if something did happen to Leonard, if he got found out,
our existence would be known.  We’d be mobbed down and murdered.

Thinking about my future makes me
shudder.