Carol Hancock: January 4, 1968 – January 11, 1968
I pulled the car into the garage at around 11:00 in the evening. I had unsuccessfully hunted Indianapolis the previous several days and I needed a rest before I continued my hunt in Chicago. The only thing I had found of interest was yet another Chimera sign, just north of Lafayette. The country was definitely going down the toilet when an Arm could casually find so many Chimera signs. Worse, I had also picked up Enkidu’s scent in Lafayette, and I kept having the ugly sensation of enemies watching me.
I slammed the door of the Buick with some extra low juice annoyance and glided past the stacks of old newspapers. Bobby had been supposed to take them out with the trash, but again he had ‘forgotten’. I hesitated a moment, wondering if I should take them out myself or lean on Bobby to do so.
“Fuck it,” I said, deciding to echo Bobby and ignore the problem.
I headed out of the garage and pulled the garage door closed behind me. A cold rain drizzled halfheartedly from the sky and plastered my hair down to my face. A couple of adventurous drops slipped inside my coat and down my back, and my shoes and the hems of my trousers absorbed water like starving sponges. I climbed the concrete bricks that served as back steps to my old house and stepped into the utility room, where I hung my dark brown heavy wool Mr. Beacon coat on the coat rack.
Dressed as a man today, I wore a gray business suit over a thick wrap around my waist to thicken it and a band around my breasts to flatten them. They had grown back a couple of weeks after Enkidu cut them off. It looked like I wouldn’t be the titless wonder after all.
I didn’t always dress as a man, but my heavy muscles actually made passing as a man easier than passing as a woman. I could do many things easier as a man. I found it irritating, a bit, because I preferred being a woman, but practicality took precedence.
The utility room trash stank. Again. Angry, I strode into the kitchen, stepping over the slippery spot on the floor with a grimace of distaste, where Bobby had spilled bacon grease several days ago. Dirty dishes piled in the sink, and a plastic bread bag and a couple of candy bar wrappers lay mixed in with the old newspapers on the kitchen table. Crumbs piled under the toaster and a brown banana rotted on the counter top. The top of the stove was thick with old grease, the floor layered with grime and old food.
I ignored it all and made my way to the living room. The kitchen always looked like that. Bobby was supposed to keep it clean. Mostly he didn’t bother. Weights had migrated from the bedroom into the living room, again. I didn’t have as complete a setup as I wanted, but I owned a full set of dumbbells, up to 125 pounds, a couple of bars, several hundred pounds worth of plates of varying sizes, and several different benches. Bobby used them as well and they worked better for him than for me. The living room held a couch, a couple of chairs and a coffee table these days, evidence of my attempts to remember my humanity. I had also hung a couple of sets of cheap cream-colored drapes over the windows and kept them always shut, to give privacy.
All those weights in the living room ruined the homey feel I had tried to create and gave my home a kind of cold hostility, a disregarded low rent feel. The room was dusty, with weights scattered all over, mixed with the remains of old copies of Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune. A paper plate with a half-eaten sandwich hid over in the corner and a coffee cup with the dregs of old coffee still in the bottom sat nearby. Bobby’s leftovers. I would never have left food uneaten and I didn’t drink coffee. My empty plates lay stacked on the coffee table among the dumbbells, still waiting where I left them.
The small dining room was a disaster with receipts, accounting books, an electronic calculator trailing fifteen feet of paper, and business paraphernalia piled in sedimentary layers. More coffee mugs decorated the table, but at least I saw some signs of activity. You practically had to be an Arm to walk across that room and not make the mess worse.
Let’s face it. My house was a dump. Several weeks ago, Bobby had gotten sick, and I had redecorated in a passion of good intentions and terror of losing Bobby. Now, with Bobby healthy again, the charming normalcy of a few weeks ago had faded into the cold utility of Arm life, mixed with the detritus of insufficient housekeeping. Damn it, I didn’t have time for housecleaning. That’s what Bobby was for.
Bobby was getting to be a problem. He didn’t fit into my life the way he should. Taking care of the house was his responsibility. Did he do anything about it? No.
I found him in the bedroom, asleep. I shook him awake, which took work. “What the fuck is going on here! Sleeping? This house is a mess and it’s your responsibility to keep it clean.”
“Carol, what? I…”
“Don’t give me that shit. I haven’t given you permission to use my name yet.” He hadn’t moved, so I grabbed him and yanked him out of bed. “You’ve got a serious attitude problem and it’s time I did…”
He panicked, clawed at my hands, and when that didn’t work he jabbed me with an elbow. His attack did nothing but enrage me, and I tightened my grip in such a way as to pinch a nerve cluster in his lower arm. He screamed in pain and took a swing at me. When I blocked with my forearm he took another.
I went immediately from angry to full-blown Arm mad. Nobody challenged me like this, not in my house, not ever. Two pops from my fists knocked him to the floor; I knelt on his abdomen and started in with the two finger pokes to the pain-causing nerve clusters.
“I’m yours…I’m yours…I’m yours…” he choked out through the pain, but I didn’t answer. He didn’t feel like mine right now, but a challenger, a rival, someone who needed to learn his place or die. I didn’t stop until he wet and shat his pants and groveled and begged me to stop enough to register as not even the slightest threat. I left him there shivering and reeking, alone and in agony, curled up on the floor in his own mess while I stalked outside to cool off.
I stalked the neighborhood for two hours before I regained my composure. I distracted myself by reviewing my recruiting and organization work. Using four disposable identities I had partly taken over the Skokie police department; unless they realized the four identities were one they would never figure out what I was doing and the games I played. I planned to use them to worm my way into the rest of the Chicagoland police information network. I didn’t recruit these ‘close’, or give them the Carol Hancock Arm treatment; I just suborned them and an investigator would have no way to trace them back to me. I had also turned two of our local mob boss’s men; they thought a rival mob boss from South Chicago owned them now, not me. Again, I had recruited these only to gain information, as per Keaton’s hints on the subject. I also found a small abandoned pet food processing plant in Cicero and turned a hidden and reinforced part of it into an Arm playground, a place for me to work out my anger and rid the world of any bad guys needing removal from life, and deposit their remains in small cement-sealed buckets in Lake Michigan.
Slowly as I walked, ever so slowly, a gradual sense of wrongness crept into me over what I did to Bobby. I knew exactly what I had done, but I didn’t understand why. Ninety minutes into my brisk walk I still hadn’t figured it out.
Bobby wasn’t my partner. He was my lover. Someone with whom I kept house. He wasn’t an Arm or an underling, though. He was…there was no word for him. No word and thus no fixed concept in my head for his status. Thus the problem.
He couldn’t ever be a real challenge to me. Not on his best day or my worst. I was ‘boss Arm of all I surveyed’, period. Then what had I been thinking? Had I been thinking?
No.
No no no no no! I had done a Keaton on him. To him. I had taken him down for no reason, just to satisfy an emotional need about at the importance level of filing off a chip on the end of a fingernail.
I had made a mistake. God damn it! This was the third mistake I had made with Bobby. What the fuck was I thinking? The first time, I had gone too far into Arm to notice how Bobby’s health had suffered trying to keep up with me. Then Bo
bby got sick and I vowed to reclaim my shriveled human soul. I had bought furniture, decorated, cooked. I had even cleaned the house for a bit. A couple of weeks after that, Greg’s incompetent effort to start a gym had blown up and I had realized how my willful disregard of my surroundings and my people had hurt both Bobby and my dream of a gym. I also realized my survival required me to notice everything around me. Since then, I had committed myself to being aware, and was becoming a hell of a lot better at it.
Now this. Damn it, I couldn’t afford so damned many fuck ups! And again, I had done it to my sweet boy-toy man.
This time, my instincts told me, was the last. Mistakes happen. As Keaton had drilled into me, when you make a mistake you take ownership of it and you clean it up.
Ah, the cleanup. Big issue there. My Arm instincts said ‘you trashed him, so take out the trash’. Kill Bobby and dispose of him in my graveyard with the rest of my kills. I had broken him, possibly irretrievably; death was his only way out, either direct suicide or ‘suicide by Arm’, by doing something stupid like trying to point a firearm at me and pull the trigger, or by trying to run. So: dispose of him and move on to the next.
Fuck instincts.
I was better than that and I would make this work.
---
I found Bobby still curled in a ball in the bedroom, shivering. I sat on the mattress beside him and marveled at his form, letting the love I remembered rattle around in my mind. I hadn’t left a mark on his body. I hadn’t needed to.
I wouldn’t make up with him in any normal fashion, either.
“Sit up,” I said. Affectionless. He did so. Hell, right now if I said ‘slit your throat’, he would do so without hesitation.
I looked him over, closely.
His eyes were more than haunted. Deep black circles nearly hid them, and not from what I had done earlier. His muscle tone was off, low. The pneumonia still lingered. He hadn’t been getting enough exercise. He cringed when I moved toward him even the slightest. Reading him, I realized ‘suicide by Arm’ was a likely outcome of his current mental state if I didn’t do something to fix the problem.
“I’m an Arm. You know that.” I paused. He became wary. “You haven’t been taking advantage of the fact I’m an Arm, though.”
“Ma’am?”
Nope, no ‘Carols’ right now. I would have to earn my supposedly more comforting name back.
“Think. Why am I angry?” My anger had passed, but he had no way to know.
“Because I haven’t done what you’ve asked of me, ma’am. I promise, really promise, I’ll do…”
We didn’t need to go there. I knew the routine by heart and it would go on indefinitely. “Did you think you had to fulfill all my demands personally?”
I had, when I originally gave him his orders. He didn’t have to know that, either.
Light dawned in his head. “I can hire people?”
“You can hire people, but…”
More light dawned. “But you’re the Arm and you can recruit people to help me. For minimal pay.”
“Yes.”
He worked things through in his head, taking several minutes, part of which involved screwing up his courage to make the necessary request. “Ma’am…Carol? I need a maid, a cook and a groundskeeper. An accountant to work with me wouldn’t hurt, either.” Just by putting himself together enough to ask properly covered over three quarters of the recovery he needed.
What I missed when I pulled a Keaton on Bobby was the fact I had worked him beyond endurance over the past month. His health still gave him trouble, and just keeping up with the books, as an untrained bookkeeper, occupied him from the time he awoke until the time he fell asleep, exhausted. He hadn’t had time to do anything else.
“Good, good,” I said, nodding. “I’ll get you the people you need. You’re mine, Bobby. You’re mine but you have to ask.”
“I’m yours,” he said. Now I gathered him into my arms and rocked him.
All better, all fixed? Not hardly.
---
“Go, Bobby!” I screamed over the roaring crowd. “Counterpunch!” Tonight I dressed as a cheap floozy and didn’t care a bit. Bobby and I had arranged a semi-pro match for him in Oak Lawn, outside of my normal stomping grounds. Two weeks had passed since I went Keaton on him, during which he had gotten himself back into fighting trim. Real exercise had finally worked the last of the pneumonia out of his system and he was a young man. He recovered. “Punch, punch, punch!”
Did I cheat? Not sure, and not sure if I cared. I directed my predator effect at Bobby and only Bobby. In the ring he couldn’t see me, so I focused my predator through my voice. I stiffened Bobby’s spine, sped him up and gave him more confidence than was really justified.
He knocked out his opponent in the third.
Afterward, after he showered and dressed, I went over and gave him a hug. He mostly controlled the cringe now, so small and involuntary only an Arm would notice. The cringe remained, though. I treated him to a late dinner at a local high-class restaurant. As always, his eyes followed my every move, wary.
Back home he bossed around the new hires and rained down hell on our new groundskeeper, who he considered a lazy jerk. To the outside world he was strong, virile and in control.
With me? Well, I still had work to do, didn’t I?
That night I had my first pinball nightmare since I left Philadelphia. As usual, I raced around, chased by giant steel pinballs, watched by the androgynous evil clown on the backboard of the pinball game. I awoke covered in sweat. When the fake police officer, Canon, accosted me in Philadelphia I had realized Officer Canon was the evil clown of my dreams. That bitch – I was 90% sure Canon was a Focus – was back in my life.
This did not improve things, not at all.
Gilgamesh: January 20, 1967
Gilgamesh stopped breathing for a moment as he carried his groceries past the reeking garbage cans and attempted to avoid tripping over the cracked walkway. Behind him he heard the constant roar of the Edens Expressway, busy even at night. His apartment was a run-down dismal affair, right next to the expressway and surrounded by asphalt and broken glass. However, the place was cheap, furnished, and within four miles of Tiamat.
He dodged the broken bottles, old trash, and a mangy half-starved cat, which always seemed to be lurking nearby. Faint mews of yet another litter of kittens rose from under the stairs. Stupid cat – the current warmth came from a January thaw, not the end of winter.
Gilgamesh had reached the top of the rusted metal stairs when he sensed the first flicker off in the distance. He froze and the panic washed through him like an ocean wave. His groceries dropped to the ground, forgotten. The flicker was close. Just over a mile. Far too close.
Gilgamesh ran.
He metasensed the flicker again, insanely close. He would never mistake it, not with the number of Beast Man traces and encounters he faced in Chicago. A Beast Man charged. A Beast should never be able to get so close to him. He didn’t recognize this Beast Man, but the Beast could kill him just the same. It would, if the Beast caught him.
Gilgamesh leapt over the railing to the ground, recklessly showing off capabilities no normal could match. He sprinted back to his truck, praying for once the truck would cooperate and not stall out underneath him. He needed to hide under Tiamat’s glow, his standard procedure when dealing with the Beasts. Besides the Arm dross, this was the reason he followed her.
This time the Beast actively hunted him.
Tiamat was nowhere in his range. Her home stood empty and he didn’t sense her in any of her usual nearby haunts. He thought she was in Chicago somewhere, but she might have gone hunting without him realizing. If she had gone hunting, he would have to flee Chicago to escape. If the Beast Man didn’t catch him first.
The Beast Man had masked himself to cover his approach. Had this been how Crow Killer’s victims had died so inexplicably?
Assume Tiamat is in Chicago, he decided. He ran through the places she might b
e in his mind, furiously trying to pick the right one.
He came up with no good answer. In the evening, she should have been home or at one of the nearby apartments where several of her people lived. Failing that, he next guessed the China Garden, out on the Tri-State Tollway north of O’Hare. He really hoped she was there because he didn’t have the room to be wrong. Sicking up on a Beast Man wouldn’t get him anywhere. If she had gone hunting, he would likely die.
He made it to his truck. Much to his relief, his multi-colored wreck started easily. He backed up into the parking lot with a squealing of tires and wound his way out on Varden street, only to get stuck behind four cars at the stoplight where Varden dead ended into Wilson. He banged on the steering wheel as the Beast Man closed, cutting across to put Gilgamesh between the Beast Man and the expressway, ready for the Beast’s final charge. The light eventually turned, and so did Gilgamesh. He followed the line of cars off Wilson and on to the Edens Expressway. Much to his surprise, the Beast Man didn’t charge. Gilgamesh was sufficiently public to escape that variety of attack.
Sweat streamed down his face as he merged on the Edens, driving on a city freeway for the first time since he transformed. Crows never went on city freeways because of the stress. It was also the first time he had ever been able to make himself take the speed all the way up to 60 miles an hour. The truck shook and rattled with the unaccustomed speed, and the other cars scared him almost as badly as the Beast Man.
The Beast Man used a smart plan: boxing him in with the expressway on one side and no way to go under or over it, knowing Crows didn’t go on expressways. This Beast held too little juice to be thinking clearly, and such cunning was a second abnormality. These abnormalities suggested this Beast had a master working with him, and Gilgamesh’s paranoid Crow inside screamed ‘Crow Killer’. His own juice attempted to back up in terror, but he ruthlessly quieted the sick-up, as well as the black edges of unconsciousness attempting to suck him down.
All Beasts Together (The Commander) Page 22
