Stubbornness wouldn’t work this time. This time he would have to be proactive, take the initiative, go against the nebulous ‘this is how things are done’. He predicted he would make big Crow enemies if he did so.
He wished he could count on the support of any of the other Crows, but after the Philadelphia Massacre, no other Crows would live so near an Arm. He had fallen away from the world, with no friendly contacts or help in months, besides the occasional letter and phone call. Worse, too many of those letters came from Crows who lived in a different world, settled in one spot, anchored by their fears.
Alone, lost, and angry, he sometimes thought of his life as a plane with a broken engine, slowly spiraling in for a crash. Now, with Tiamat gone, he had lost the second engine, leaving him with only the wind whistling past him as he fell.
What to do, though? He didn’t know the first thing about taking the initiative. He groused, he ruminated, he meditated, and after far too much of all three a strange new thought grew loud in his mind: what would Tiamat do?
The thought put a smile on Gilgamesh’s face.
The answer was what Tiamat always did: organize.
So what if his ‘organizing things’ did buck the Crow vision of how things are done? After his letter from Shadow last December, the one where Shadow told him to quit asking questions, he suspected he wouldn’t like the reaction he would get from the other Crows if he started to organize. Worse, he couldn’t ask, the question itself forbidden. The situation left him with an unnerving general terror with no target, and a very strong distrust of most of the other Crows.
He thought through his options, and wrote a mental list in his mind of whom he trusted: Sinclair and Midgard, who both moved around all the time (though Sinclair maintained a PO Box in Maryland and Midgard in Boston).
Shadow, in New York.
Sky, in Toronto.
Occum in Boston.
Ezekiel, in Miami.
Nobody else.
Later, while sipping from the Madison Focus, he realized what he needed to do. He needed to contact other Major Transforms. If the Crows were a problem, he needed help from elsewhere. The other Crows would try to talk him out of his plan, of course. They might even try to stop him. They would tell him he was too young to be doing things like this.
This time, he wouldn’t listen. He was tired of listening.
The first Major Transform he needed to contact was the Skinner.
He sat down and wrote the first draft of a letter.
Carol Hancock: March 5, 1968
I was in a cell. I recognized the style: early Transform Sickness Detention Center. Just like St. Louis, only with fouler air. I remembered my capture and snippets of the long trip from Chicago to my current location, but only snippets. I had been doing too much healing. I was famished but not thirsty. Many days had passed.
They had brought me into this oppressive fortress and proceeded to carve me up with knives. They called their carving an operation, but they worked from ignorance. Some fool doctor named Wilson thought his carving would help me heal. Anesthetic doesn’t affect me, though, so they did without. Most of my injuries would have healed better without their intervention. They did get the rest of the bullets out, though.
Dr. Wilson said I had a severed spine, and I would never walk again.
My name is Carol Hancock and I’m an Arm. As usual, I was in my standard habitat: deep deep shit. I had been an Arm, a Major Transform, about eighteen months. As a member of biologically altered humanity – a Transform – I was not exactly human any more. I possessed an extra sense, the metasense, and an extra substance my body relied on and was addicted to: juice, a substance produced in quantity by my prey, Transforms. I had spent most of my career as an Arm in someone else’s hands: a captive in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center, in the hands of the sadistic Arm Stacy Keaton, for a few beautiful but harried months on my own, and now here, a captive again. My fateful history made me wonder why I even bothered, but each time I escaped, I did so to save my sorry ass. I had also, in that time, fought seven Chimeras, the male counterpart to the Arm, and killed four, though none of the ones I killed were quality. That is, none of them could talk.
The kicker in my current captivity was my captor, Special Agent Patrick McIntyre, my chief tormenter in my St. Louis incarceration. He had captured me with several hundred of his uniformed officer friends and one unknown enemy, self-named Officer Canon, who I believed to be a disguised Focus and likely an actual police officer or FBI agent. Focuses, Crows and Chimeras are different varieties of Major Transforms, and they all had their tricks.
As a young Arm, their tricks all seemed better than my tricks, alas.
After Dr. Wilson finished the operation my captors left me on the heavy reinforced operating table. They had rolled the table through the long halls of this vile place, down the elevator to the basement, and into this cell. The steel bands and chains still held me immobile. They didn’t give me clothes or any kind of a blanket, but the layers of bandages covered me so completely it was almost the same.
I still wore a catheter and an IV drip. Sugar water slowly flowed into my veins. Monitor leads, taped to my body, led to a big black machine next to me, going beep, beep in time with my slow heartbeat.
The cell itself was a bleak place, about ten feet wide and seven deep, the walls made of cinderblocks and painted an institutional green. The floor was gray concrete. The door into the cell was steel and the wall dividing my cell from the corridor wasn’t a wall, but simply a rank of steel bars. Six inches outside the bars stood a clear wall made from some kind of strengthened glass. Outside the glass, a guard stood in the corridor and watched me. A camera pointed at my room from beside the door. The wire cage in the center of the high ceiling held a light bulb, giving harsh light to the cell. The cell smelled of Monster.
I lay immobile on my table, trying to tune out the grinding agony of my wounds and the lingering pains of surgery, and looked for rats. Dungeons should have rats. Along with the water dripping from dank walls and the screams of the dying in the distance. I expected Dr. Manigault, the director of the St. Louis Detention Center, to waft his evil presence outside the wall any minute now.
This place exuded stark silence with a vengeance, the only sounds low background murmurs. I tried to metasense some other Transform in this huge building and complex, but the only thing I encountered was the poisonous presence of the building itself, bloated with the pain the place drunk from me. My metasense attempt sent stabbing pain through my brain and left me with a blinding headache.
Metasensing shouldn’t hurt. No building, however dangerous, should carry an air of poisonous malice. I wondered what this place would do to me. Something was definitely odd about this building. If the St. Louis Detention Center had damaged my juice structure, this malevolent place would likely do far worse. I would have liked to know what, but juice structure damage was a long-term problem. My extensive wounds and my hunger loomed as much larger and more immediate problems.
I wondered which of the Detention Centers held me this time.
Gilgamesh: March 5, 1968
“I’m in St. Louis, now,” Gilgamesh said, whispering into the mouthpiece of the phone outside Pistol Pete’s Pawnshop. “I would like you to do me a few favors.”
“Favors? What sort of favors?” Shadow asked.
“Well, first, I would like Tiamat found. I need to find out which government agency is keeping her, and where.”
Shadow paused, thinking. “You don’t ask for small favors, do you?”
“No. I would like this kept quiet, too. I’m finding I don’t trust a great many Crows with whom I exchange letters.” Gilgamesh waited uneasily for Shadow’s response to his overly formal and bold request. Shadow followed a share-and-share-alike attitude regarding the Crows. Like one, like them all, Shadow said. Factional politics was destroying the better-organized Focuses. Shadow thought the Crows couldn’t afford factional politics.
“So,” Shadow said, “Your call. Wh
o do you trust?”
Gilgamesh breathed a sigh of relief. “You, of course. Sinclair, Ezekiel, Sky and Midgard. Occum, though he doesn’t trust me.”
“Occum? My friend Occum hasn’t been willing to deal with other Crows in person since the Philadelphia Massacre. He suspects something bad is going on and won’t say what. He’s also got at least three tamed Beast Men now, and in his infrequent letters he claims to be making progress. I’m not saying he’s untrustworthy, but his life is changing and I’m reserving judgment until I see what sort of Crow emerges later.”
Gilgamesh nodded. Exactly. Exactly why Gilgamesh wanted Occum in, because Gilgamesh also suspected something bad was going on. The more he thought about Tiamat’s capture, the more improbable everything seemed. Tiamat had ample police contacts. Why didn’t they warn her? How did they get so many police, state troopers and FBI into town so quickly? How did they work through the standard jurisdiction issues? Why did the Beast Men stand nearby to witness Tiamat’s capture? He couldn’t answer a single one of his questions.
However, if he worked with Shadow, he would have to live with Shadow’s fears. He would contact Occum on his own, later, regarding his plans.
“Second, I need to find out where the Skinner – Stacy Keaton – has ended up. I’m going to try and convince her to lead a rescue of Tiamat. If I can’t convince her by letter, I’m going to have to try to contact her in person.”
“She’s somewhere on the West Coast, but I don’t know the exact location,” Shadow said. He paused. “Contacting her again is a terrible risk. Especially dealing with her in person.”
“Yes. Of course,” Gilgamesh said. He didn’t think of his first meeting with the Skinner as ‘contacting her’, as he had been tied to a chair at the time. “I’d much rather avoid any personal meetings.”
Shadow paused again. Two young black men hurried over to the front door of Pistol Pete’s carrying bulky items under their worn coats. They entered the shop quickly, after first glancing to the left and right. “You’d better take care of yourself, Gilgamesh. The Skinner, bad enough on her own right, deals with the darkest of Focuses. There’s no telling what she might do if she got her hands on you.”
“Yes, yes,” Gilgamesh said. “I won’t talk to the Skinner in person, save as an absolute last resort.” Even the thought of such a meeting made him break out in a sweat.
“Anything else?”
“I need a better way of contacting Sky, like a phone number of that ‘Focus HR’ he lives in the shadow of in Toronto. If I’m going to go and be adventurous, I figure I’d better talk to the real deal and get some pointers.”
“My. Okay, troublemaker, if you’re willing to tell me everything you did once you’re finished with this adventure of yours, I’ll get all of this information for you,” Shadow said.
Carol Hancock: March 6, 1968
In the slow silent hours of night, under the harsh unblinking light of the caged bulb, I prayed. Or tried to pray.
Praying was always an unsettling experience for me. I had no right to God’s mercy, or any form of love or favors, and I always came to him awkwardly. Yes, I know theologically how none of us has a right to God’s love or mercy, but as an Arm, it hits harder.
In captivity, I prayed anyway, knowing how badly I needed his help. I closed my eyes and opened my mind, searching for that tenuous connection to the Almighty. For the first time, I felt something. A response, a sense of life, will, on the other end, wanting to connect with me, bring me in to its embrace. A flash of white robes, sea green eyes. Darkness. Madness. An unmistakable sensation of female.
My heart rate spiked and I tried to sit up. The chains binding me held me down. This was not God.
What sort of hell had I entered, where even prayer was forbidden?
I settled back into position and tried to bring my heart rate back down where it belonged, eyes open wide, not daring to close them for fear of encountering whatever aspect of Satan ruled this hell.
I told myself firmly that God was still out there. He would still watch me even if I couldn’t pray to him. He would know I tried to pray.
I told myself firmly I had run into some random juice effect, preying on my vulnerable mind. I wasn’t really in the hands of Satan.
I didn’t try to pray again.
The lights didn’t change over the long hours I watched with wide open eyes, but I suspected the night had turned to morning again. The first round of aides came in and loosened my chains just a bit. Enough to let me shift positions, painfully, but not enough to move. The pain reminded me that my wounds remained unhealed, not even counting the spinal injury. My oft-wounded left shoulder felt off in a very bad way.
Every few hours an aide would come in, change the IV, check my catheter bag and its hideous non-urine-colored contents and check my always-seeping bandages. The aides always came with a guard escort; two of them would hold guns on me as a third tightened my chain so that I couldn’t touch the aide as he worked. That third guard couldn’t have tightened the chain by himself if I hadn’t let him, but for now, I cooperated. I let them think the pulley made them stronger than me.
The aide carefully never came close to my hands.
Later that morning I fouled myself, forcing the aide to clean me up. I still lay on my stomach and in this position, he would be able to clean me, but the sheet under me was a problem. Because of the cart’s design, he couldn’t get the sheet off with my feet locked down.
“Hey, Fritz, gimme the key here,” the aide said to one of the guards, pushing the black monitor to the side. He was a little bit shorter than six feet, heavy, with a kind of flabby softness. He had a faint, foul odor of someone who should wash more often.
“What are you doing, there?” Fritz said.
“I gotta get at this sheet. I need her legs out of the way.”
“You outta your mind, Johnny? You can’t let her go.”
“Give it a rest, Fritz. What’s she gonna do? She’s half-dead and a cripple besides. She can’t even keep from crapping all over herself. Gimme the keys.” He reeked of fear and false bravado. I couldn’t have asked for better if I tried.
Fritz looked me over. I closed my eyes and acted harmless. Johnny prodded my leg and it wiggled limply. Fritz shrugged and threw the keys to Johnny.
Johnny unlocked my legs and changed the sheet, still staying carefully out of range of my hands. My legs flopped uselessly. As Johnny surmised, I was no less helpless with my legs unchained. He carefully locked me back down again when he finished.
After they left I lay on my table and scratched around the surgical tape holding the sensors to my body. The tape irritated my skin, a line of red welts growing around each piece of tape. I’m not normally subject to rashes, but I had one now. It would be so easy to just rip the sensors off me, free myself of the itch, and free myself from the invasive curiosity of the doctors.
I didn’t. Right next to me, the machine continued with its steady beep, watching over me from my left, as the camera watched me from the right.
The machine was large and black, a construct of metal and glass. My metal cot lay crosswise in the cell, with my right side to the bars and the camera and my left to the black machine. Nothing blocked the view of either the guard or the camera.
The monitor itself sat almost against the back wall of the cell. My table rolled. Even better, the lines going from the monitor to the sensors connected me to the black machine.
My jailors had left me a weapon.
With a little bit of careful shifting of the weight of my body and tension on the sensor leads, I would be able to bring myself close enough to that monitor to reach it with my right hand. A few swift punches would crumple the thin metal shell and give me access to the machinery inside. I should be able to use the remains of the metal shell as a weapon. If I threw the metal remains edgewise and gave it enough spin, I suspected I could kill someone. The machinery inside would almost certainly provide something to use as a lock pick.
The
monitor wasn’t the only weapon my captors had provided me. The IV, taped to the back of my left hand, for one. The IV bottle hung on a hook at my feet, but a flip of the tube when the bottle was light would bring it down. That glass bottle was another weapon, the IV needle another lock pick.
So no, I wouldn’t pull the sensors off or pull the IV out. No matter how much they itched. I wasn’t doing anything, now; I was in no condition to escape. The time would come. I would wait.
‘She has a severed spine. She’ll never walk again.’ Fools. They knew nothing. I expected my severed spine would heal. Depending on how many days passed since my capture, my spine might heal as soon as today. No matter. I would be able to escape this place. I had plenty of juice for a good burn during an escape. Despite how much I had used while healing, I had at least a week before withdrawal threatened me.
A bit later a different aide came. This one, another man, took a blood sample. I wondered if all the staff were men. I had expected female nurses. The only idea I came up with was the possibility they considered this place too dangerous for women. Can’t have the ladies dealing with a dangerous Arm. The ladies can become Arms and Monsters, no problem. Can’t deal with them, though.
Dr. Wilson came by an hour later and checked my wounds. They healed slowly, because the sheer number of them overwhelmed my healing abilities. I also suspected the foul nature of the building affected my healing. Dr. Wilson seemed pleased with what he saw, but left without saying anything to me.
McIntyre came in a while after Wilson. McIntyre was of medium height, about thirty-five years old. His short brown hair was just beginning to recede and he practically vibrated with a contained nervous energy. He smelled of soap, aftershave and deodorant. His shirt, socks and underwear were all freshly washed, but he wore suits several times before he sent them to the cleaners and he also clearly spent a lot of time among people who smoked. He gargled with Listerine to cover bad breath, from a problem with his gums. He wasn’t married, he had been drinking last night, and he had jacked off in the shower this morning.
A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) Page 2
