A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  “No paper trail,” Keaton said, pacing in front of the five of them. Drill sergeant Arm. “I can’t believe you were going to pay for the gas with a credit card! Where the hell did you leave your brains?”

  “Ma’am, we were just…” Tina said, her face pale.

  “Following your standard procedures.” Keaton got into Tina’s face, the muscular woman being the one who had almost paid for the gasoline with a credit card. “Dammit, you’re on your way to break an Arm out of a fucking fort! We’re going to be killing people! If you leave a paper trail behind you, you’re going to spend the rest of your short miserable lives in jail.”

  Keaton wasn’t a shouter. She barely raised her voice, barely put any anger into her voice. Contempt, yes, quite often. Exasperation, continual. Sky stood ramrod straight and tried not to think too much. If he thought too much, he might slip and start running, letting the panic take him.

  “We don’t do illegal very well, Stacy,” Lori said. Keaton still treated Sky like a Transform. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t figured out there was something unusual about him, but if she did, she gave no sign. He wondered if his love had done something subtle with her charisma to make the Arm a little more susceptible to Sky’s disguise.

  “Why do you have all these goddamned weapons then, anyway?” Inferno’s arsenal was extensive. Sky had been appalled the first time he watched them open up the armory. They seemed so peace-loving. Only people on active bodyguard duty went armed, and not with any of the arsenal’s weapons. When he asked what they needed the anti-tank weapons for, they told him ‘Monsters’.

  He knew they collected Monster bounties but their explanation was a bit much.

  They wanted him armed as well, but he objected. Firearms went ‘bang’. He wasn’t sure what went faster, the bullet going toward the target or the Crow running the other way in panic. Did Lori or anyone else listen? No. Of course not. Instead, they hauled him out to a firing range and taught him to work out his firearm panic issues in several long sessions. Eventually, he did lose the panic. Of course, he was a natural, with his Crow senses and Major Transform fine muscular control. By the time Keaton showed up he was minimally proficient in several of their firearms, enough to provoke Sadie to mutter obscene things about Major Transforms and their unfair advantages. Of course, if they expected him to kill something with a gun, they would be in for a surprise. They might not follow all the Buddhist precepts, but he did. Subject to his liberal interpretation, of course.

  “Self-defense. Hunting Monsters. Intimidating Transforms,” Tim said, answering Keaton. “I’m not sure we’ve ever shot at anyone who might take us to court afterwards. Or who the police might care about us shooting. Ma’am.”

  “You understand what we’re doing is different? You’re not going to give me any grief about shooting at normals, are you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Tim said. “We know what we signed up for.”

  Keaton turned back to Tina. “You, shit for brains. Follow me. You need to learn a little discipline.”

  Tina paled further and she spoke with a tremor in her voice. “Ma’am, I’ll do better, please, I’ll…” The Arm glared at Tina and Tina fell silent. Tina liked the Arm, Sky had noted. Tina was single, rough, and a little difficult for Sky to figure out. He once thought she was a lesbian. No, there were three in the household, but she wasn’t one of them. Tina slept with both men and women, but only on Friday nights. She mingled with a small group of singles; Sky never quite figured out what went on among them, save for the fact they didn’t seem to do sex at all save on Friday nights. Tina’s crowd belonged to the engineering crew, and the engineer crew had a different culture and feel to them compared to the rest of the household. One of Tina’s crew was a normal who had no other ties to the household save that he was part of Tina’s crew. They hung out with the goddamn doctor, Zielinski, by choice. Insane.

  “Damned straight you will, after I’m through with you.”

  “Wait,” Lori said. “We don’t punish people in Inferno that way.”

  “I do.”

  “Wait,” Lori said to Keaton. She turned to the four of them. “Did she mess up, in your eyes?” Tim and Eileen nodded. Sam shrugged. “You accept punishment, Tina?”

  “Yes, Focus.”

  Lori waved her hand and Tina fell over in pain. Sky avoided wincing, but only barely. Lori had stripped Tina of her juice. The hand waving affectation had confused Sky the first time he saw Lori do the gesture. Focuses didn’t need gestures to move juice. He figured it out, eventually. Lori used the gestures as a sign of formality and finality.

  “Not good enough,” Keaton said, quiet and growly.

  “Fine,” Lori said, arms folded. “I discipline my people. No one else. If my discipline doesn’t satisfy you, you discipline me.”

  Keaton smiled. “Fine. You eat the pain. None of your fucking Focus tricks.”

  Lori nodded.

  Keaton frowned. “Don’t push me, Focus. I’m not going to hold back because you’re a Focus.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. I meant what I said. Only I discipline my people. If you have a discipline issue, you go through me.”

  Keaton thought about this for a moment and shrugged. “Okay.”

  Crap, there they went again! They were both raving lunatics. What got into you to agree to something like that, my love? Don’t you know what you’re in for?

  Keaton dragged Lori off into the woman’s restroom, a primitive outhouse with barely more than a hole in the ground for sanitation. The screaming started momentarily. Tim’s hand clamped hard around Sky’s upper arm before Sky had a chance to think.

  “Let’s talk,” Tim said, and dragged Sky around to the other side of the VW, past Tina, still curled up on the ground. “Hold on to yourself, Sam. Don’t interfere.”

  Sky looked into the back of the VW bus, at the two humps under the blankets. Two Transforms, tied and gagged, tagged by Lori. One, a small white man in a business suit, murmured ‘Mary’ every once in a while when his misery became too great, or sometimes ‘don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right’. The other, a medium-sized black man, held his hands together in a position of prayer and kept trying to mindlessly lever himself into a kneeling position. Lori had called Focus Biggioni and gotten the locations of two Transforms likely to go unclaimed, within shouting distance of Boston. They had grabbed them. Disguised. With a little help from Lori to supply the Focus presence, Eileen masqueraded as a Focus, in this case a fictitious Focus Smith. Lori masqueraded as a woman Transform. In fact, the entire crew turned out to be masters of disguise. Sky wondered what sort of jobs Inferno normally did, especially since they didn’t do showy illegal activities. He suspected there was far more to Inferno’s activities than he had seen, and he had seen enough to keep his head spinning for the next year.

  “How can you let Lori do this?” Sky said. He knew Arm hearing capabilities well enough to keep his voice down.

  “She’s the Focus. This is her job,” Tim said. “Besides, it’s Lori’s way of punishing all of us, Tina especially. What do you think this is doing to Tina?”

  Sky nodded and didn’t reply. He metasensed exactly what Keaton did to Lori. It wasn’t pretty. If he, with his minimal links to the household, was about ready to burst, he shuddered to think what this did to Lori’s Transforms. Especially Tina, who now writhed on the ground, on the other side of the VW. Sky still boggled at Lori’s control of the juice. Neither Eileen or Tim’s juice levels wiggled even a bit.

  “What’s this about ‘eating the pain’?” Sky whispered. What madness could make his love accept Keaton’s torture? No matter how much she despised herself, she shouldn’t accept pain like this.

  “The Focus doesn’t feel pain if she doesn’t want to. She learned to eat pain when the regional council punished her for trying to prove that Transforms like you existed,” Tim said, copying Sky’s whisper. That only made the guilt worse, Sky realized.

  Keaton was a bloody walking nightmare.
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  Lori pointed and Keaton nodded. They approached the CDC facility, on foot, at night. Lori had pointed out a pair of state police well up ahead of them. Keaton motioned for the Inferno crew to follow her, and they did, trying to circle around the state police. The police were about a kilometer away from the CDC Detention Center. Sky couldn’t say anything, but he could tell Hancock wasn’t conscious. She appeared to be in a coma. Something was wrong with her and her glow. Some of the problem was the Detention Center itself; the place was a dross disaster, years of unclaimed sludge dross caked to everything, even the ceilings. The rest of Hancock’s problem was internal, far beyond his abilities to comprehend.

  Sky didn’t really want to think too hard about the Detention Center. The place had gone over years ago, practically alive on its own. Malevolent and hungry.

  Keaton stopped and pointed ahead. Lori knelt beside Keaton and stared. Another set of officers blocked the way. Their crew had been circling for two hours and found no easy way through the cordon set up around the CDC.

  Lori and Keaton wiggled eyebrows at each other. The two of them shared some sort of non-verbal communication method Sky hadn’t been able to crack. They could practically speak to each other with non-verbal signals. The signals included more than wiggling eyebrows; also involving altering body odors, muscle tension, heart rate, and of course, the juice. Sky couldn’t imagine the discipline and mental focus needed to learn this non-verbal language. He certainly didn’t have the discipline. Lori and the Arm stood, and started leading the others out. Tim and Tina manhandled the Transforms, turned them around, and off they went.

  The poor volunteer Transforms proved to be the worst of the nightmare. Lori fed them only enough juice to be mobile, but not enough juice to be anything other than docile. Keaton had gotten in their faces and did the Arm predator thing until the businessman and the praying man lost all their free will. Sky tried not to think about the morality involved. Lori couldn’t support them as part of her household, as she was full up. She could keep the two men out of withdrawal for long enough for the Arm to use them as walking juice supplies. Cold, callous, and cruel. Lori showed no more signs of being bothered by this sort of activity than the Arm, but then again Lori’s emotions were locked down as tight as possible. He could be completely wrong.

  Sky wondered what he was doing on this side of the fight. His sympathies lay with the police and the poor Transforms serving as Arm food. Yes, the authorities had long ago mistreated him enough for him to lose his empathy toward normal society, but this was a bit much. He didn’t hunt normals. Well, not for a long time, at least. In the mess in Quebec City, a long time ago, he had acted as a spotter for the crew springing Focus from her detention. Back then, he tended to get a little panicked just being out in the daylight. Unlike the Arm in the Detention Center, Focus hadn’t harmed anyone, just scared them.

  Focus’ jailers had been thugs, just some suborned authorities and a private businessman slash mobster slash evildoer and his minions. Sky felt no guilt about the minor harassment the rescue team had inflicted. These poor police on the other hand, keeping a tight cordon around the Detention Center, didn’t deserve what would happen to them if things got violent. Their bosses, yes. These poor officers just followed orders to uphold the law.

  Sky hadn’t expected to be having moral problems. He would have to do some hard thinking about his situation, later.

  They trooped back a kilometer farther from the Detention Center and stopped for a rest under a huge red oak at an abandoned private campground.

  “Do you have any ideas, Stacy?” Lori said.

  “Huh. I’d swear there are more of these idiots than there were two days ago.”

  “Something’s changed,” Tim said.

  Keaton thought for a moment. “Damn. Makes sense. They broke Hancock.” Keaton paced, her scowl growing by the second. “I’m going to rip Biggioni’s lungs out.”

  “I thought you’d decided not to blame Biggioni?” Lori said, standing, and looking like she wanted to pace, herself.

  “That was when Hancock was just a captive.” Keaton went on at length about what she would like to do to Biggioni, including a dispassionate description of a bunch of torture tricks she had recently learned from Middle East military sources, involving power drills and grinders. Sky rested with his back against the trunk of the oak tree and desperately tried to avoid throwing up as Keaton waxed eloquent. Tim and Eileen, next to him, looked green as well. Not Tina. She looked like she took mental notes.

  Sky reminded himself to stay on Tina’s good side.

  “What will that get you?” Lori said, very quietly but also quite intensely. “I think you’d want something more suited for Transforms.”

  Keaton nodded. Sky wondered if Keaton realized Lori rolled her. Now why couldn’t his love do that trick when Keaton wanted to torture her? ‘There are limits even to my capabilities,’ Lori would say, but Sky wondered if his love wanted someone to make her suffer.

  “I think we’re going to have to risk letting them know we’re here,” Keaton said, eventually. “I’ll lead the way.”

  Lori agreed, the rest of them groaned, and they were off.

  They moved in stages. Keaton would bedazzle some poor officer, focus his attention away from the rest of them while they snuck on by. Sky recognized the trick as a variant of the one he used to control animals. Keaton would hide in the bushes, behind a tree, or up in a tree, and work on the officer or officers until they believed something they couldn’t see was over in Keaton’s direction. Lori chipped in a couple of times as well, using a ‘help help I’m in trouble’ routine followed by another charismatic effect to interfere with their memories. Each one exhausted Lori further, and after the second, Sky practically had to carry her along as she recovered. Keaton’s trick seemed no less costly. By the time they reached the barbed wire fence around the CDC building proper, Keaton was muttering to herself about armies of police needing to die.

  They got a good look at the mob guarding the fence, and their hearts sank. Not only were the state police out in force, the place crawled with CDC guards and Feds from at least three agencies, the FBI, ATF and Secret Service. Keaton slumped down and backed off. They all followed. They wouldn’t succeed with their charisma games against so many guards. They had to retreat.

  Their retreat proved to be as bad as getting in.

  When they reached their original gathering point at the vacant campground, dawn illuminated the east and everyone was exhausted.

  “I don’t think we’re going to get in tonight,” Lori said. She collapsed on the ground by the giant oak tree, juice quivering in exhaustion.

  “No shit,” Keaton said with an eye flicker at the lightening sky, and turned to look at Tina. Tina backed off, shaken.

  “Hey!” Lori said, peering up from the ground. “No poaching.”

  Keaton just growled. The Arm turned away from Tina at last, streaked over to Tim, who held the black praying Transform. “Mine,” Keaton said. She grabbed the Transform, hauled him five meters away, and started to rip his clothes off. Then her clothes off. She hissed and hugged him tight. All before anyone but Sky (and perhaps Lori) realized what was going on.

  Sky got to Lori before Keaton started to hug the Transform. He had seen this play enough to know the ending. He put his hand over Lori’s mouth in time to stop her from screaming at the top of her lungs. Instead, she screamed in his hand. Keaton kept her juice sucking routine going for nearly five minutes. Sky had never seen anything like it. Arm kills usually took about five seconds. When Keaton finished, though, she didn’t fall to the ground in the normal Arm faint the way Sky had expected. Instead, the Arm just stood and smiled.

  Lori wept. Sky hugged her.

  “Get over it,” Keaton said to Lori. “That’s what he was meant for.”

  “Fu-u-u-ck yah-ah-ah-ooo.”

  The Arm strode over and sneered down at Lori and Sky. “Sentimental weakling. Get up. We’ve got to get out of here.”

&nb
sp; “Nah-nah-nah-tah es-es-es-en-en-ti-ti-men-men-men-tah.” Lori wrenched herself out of Sky’s arms, sending him flying backwards. From the ground, he watched Lori stand up and push her nose to within inches of Keaton’s. Lori didn’t wipe away her tears. Instead, she grabbed Keaton’s naked shoulders and did something with the juice.

  Keaton gasped and fell back.

  “Imagine five minutes of that, bitch,” Lori said. Somehow, with a juice pattern, Lori had recreated her experience and dropped it on Keaton. Sky had no idea Focuses could do tricks like that.

  “That was uncalled for, you fucking douche bag,” Keaton said, cold. “You’ll bleed for that.”

  “That’s what it felt like to me,” Lori said, her voice high with rage. “It didn’t stop, either. For five minutes. Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

  “You’re weak, Focus. Tonya just blinked a couple of times when I took one of her tagged Transforms. She even juiced me up in the process. Unlike you.” Keaton’s voice was cold and contemptuous.

  Fire and water. The Arm and Lori were like fire and water – utterly incompatible personalities, and too much power and will for the wellbeing of anyone nearby. Sky was appalled to realize his love was the fire and the out of control Arm was the water. Why couldn’t he have fallen in love with a nice, sedate Focus who ran a dry cleaning business? No, Sky, you idiot, you had to choose a bleeping thermonuclear weapon for a lover.

  “She rolled you,” Lori said. Sky could hear the unvoiced ‘pinhead’ appended to Lori’s statement in his head. So could Keaton, whose eyes narrowed. “She didn’t want you to know how much of a weapon you had against her.”

  “What? You don’t care if I have a weapon like that to use against you?”

  “Do that again and I’ll turn your brain into blood pudding,” Lori said. Keaton blinked.

  “What use is having the Transforms, then?” Keaton said, her voice neutral, edging on sarcasm.

  “Let me untag them first.”