No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5)

by Randall Farmer

  Focus Innkeep went the other way, accentuating her beauty. Thin, muscular, and graceful would be the words Gilgamesh would have used – beyond the word ‘beauty’.

  She didn’t seem conceited or arrogant, though. She just pulled up a chair out back, after chasing the adolescents off, and grabbed his attention directly. “So, Crow, what can I do for you? I hope you aren’t here for d’bad juice, cuz we got ourselves enough Crows for the problem.” She concentrated for a moment. “Though you scared ‘em off.” Although well into evening, the glow from the windows of the shack provided plenty of light for a Crow’s eyes. Bullfrogs roared somewhere in the distance, and crickets chirped much closer.

  “Ma’am, the Crow Merlin told me you might be able to help me. I’m putting together a survey on Crow life, and I happened to overhear you may have witnessed an attempted kidnapping…”

  Focus Innkeep crossed her arms and stared at Gilgamesh. Her entire house went silent.

  “Don’t you lie to me none, boy,” she said. “You don’t have the knack.”

  Gilgamesh gulped. “It isn’t prudent for me to…”

  “Forget it, then,” she said, shaking her head. “Truth, or I send you away. You’re gonna have to trust me, one way or the other.”

  The odds were Merlin hadn’t sent him to Focus Innkeep to get rid of him in a permanent fashion. Surely. Merlin was, well, distracted by his work, though Gilgamesh couldn’t understand a single thing the Guru tried to tell him about the intricacies of dross construct creation. He had to beg off, at least until he learned more and got older.

  “Truth, then. I’m trying to hunt up evidence about an entity or entities who are killing Crows.”

  “There’s one kill’n Crows? Since when?”

  “The first death got reported in late September of last year. As far as we know, Crow Killer has killed eight Crows. We might be missing a few.”

  “Hmm. Same period a bunch of unexplained attacks on Transforms been happening, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I think it’s the same person or people.”

  She shook her head. “Not if it’s like what I witnessed. One of my Crows, Iron Rick, was out walking, and I happened to be out getting some fresh air, myself. Two in the morning, back in early April. Police man came up, started to hassle Iron Rick. My boys walked over to investigate – and then the Man took off. Only, Iron Rick he remember nothin’. No po-lice man, I say.”

  Officer Canon? Interesting.

  “I don’t know much about the attacks on Transforms, ma’am,” Gilgamesh said. “What was different?”

  “Why, everything, Crow. Those’re attacks. Struggles. Several got actually runned down. Focuses think its Arms, or Monsters or somethin’ else Transform, ‘cause a couple happened in plain sight and the Focus didn’t notice nothin’. Not po-lice men.”

  “Can you show me where Iron Rick got approached, ma’am?”

  “I’ll have Paulie do it, sure. Come back and talk, after, okay, Crow?”

  Gilgamesh nodded, and waited until Paulie and three other men came out to lead him to the spot where the ‘policeman’ approached Iron Rick. The spot was at the corner, around five hundred feet from Focus Innkeep’s residence. Just out of the Focus’s metasense range. Gilgamesh metasensed a faint trace of old dross in the area, and he got down on his hands and knees, and sniffed. “Here,” he said, whispering to himself. “Right here, there was a Beast Man.” Not recently. Took a leak or something. Marking territory?

  “No, no,” Paulie said. “Iron Rick was over here.” Paulie was standing about forty feet down the road.

  Gilgamesh nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ve got all I can get.”

  They led him back to the Focus. “Whatchu find, Crow?”

  “Beast Man trace, out a ways from where Iron Rick got approached.”

  “Beast Man? What’s a Beast Man?”

  “Male Arm. All the one’s I’ve seen are big and Monster-like. The Beast stood about forty feet away from the policeman. To the left.”

  “I din’t see nothin’ over that way, Crow. What this mean?”

  “This means the policeman was an older Major Transform, good enough to make other Transforms invisible to the metasense. The Beast Man stayed outside of your metasense range. In the dark, some Beast Men can blend into the night, just like Crows can.” It fit the pattern.

  Focus Innkeep frowned. “One thing. I wasn’t here. I was walkin’ behind the Nelson’s right then, keeping track of things.”

  Right. Focus Innkeep’s household sprawled out over a small neighborhood. Gilgamesh winced.

  “The older Major Transform was good enough to hide a Beast Man from a Focus’s metasense while separated by forty feet or more.” That realization nearly brought on a full panic. He doubted fewer than a dozen Crows and Focuses in the United States possessed the skill and power for such a trick.

  “I don’ like to hear those words, Crow. That’s not good news.”

  Gilgamesh couldn’t have agreed more. They were up against one of the top hidden Major Transform leaders.

  Henry Zielinski: June 2, 1968

  The tableau in Keaton’s basement reminded him of something out of Hieronymus Bosch. The place stank of shit, piss and old blood, as well as captive Monster. The Monster was of the chimp-Monster variety, with black fur and a saggital crest anchoring jaw muscles powerful enough to bite through a leg or arm. She moaned and cursed when Keaton was absent, but when Keaton approached, the Monster didn’t make a sound. He had talked to her and engaged her in rough conversation. She missed her master, one Ursus the Mountain Man. She had never had a Focus. She didn’t eat people because of something called the Law, something the Master gave to the Mountain Men and their Monster Gals.

  His curiosity was nearly enough to let him ignore the horror of the basement.

  Zielinski took a deep breath, despite the stench, to steady himself. Behind him wiggled the portable chalkboard Keaton had procured from somewhere. Chalk, too, even though he hadn’t asked for it. To his left, strung up on a weight machine, dripping blood, gagged, and under orders to pay attention to absolutely everything he said, was the baby Arm, Haggerty. Keaton had hoisted her easy chair over her shoulder and lugged it down to the basement just for this. That show was almost worth the ticket, all by itself. Hancock sat on a rickety kitchen chair, in charge of refreshments and snacks for all, the happiest he had seen her since she tagged him. Hancock genuinely loved to serve Keaton when Keaton was in one of her expansive moods. He hadn’t expected this behavior. Like everything Arms did, they took the normal human response and amplified it by two orders of magnitude. The meanest and most brutal banana republic dictator would have gone nuts with someone serving him with the solicitude Hancock showed today. Instead, Keaton loved the service, and got playful.

  Keaton’s tag on Hancock had changed things for the better. They might be a pack of only two Arms, but they were already a dangerous pack. He hoped the Transform community was ready to deal with packs of Arms, because it wouldn’t be pretty once the Arms got themselves organized in greater numbers.

  Zielinski limbered up his fingers, did his best to tune out the gruesome basement, and made sure he had the attention of the two Arms. He started.

  Zielinski’s Eissler Story: September 1967

  A head peeked over the edge of Henry Zielinski’s balcony from above, unkempt, female, and young. “Good morning,” she said in German. Zielinski managed not to jump, but only barely. “Follow me. I am uncomfortable in places like this.” Eissler. Who else? The familiar mix of excitement and stark panic washed over him, as well as sudden doubts about his own sanity. He had worked off and on for nearly two years to arrange this meeting. Now all he needed to do was survive the experience.

  “Where?”

  Eissler swung over the edge of the balcony, hanging from one hand and pointing with the other. “See that yellow trail marker? Go there and follow me. Alone.” She dropped to the ground and vanished. Zielinski turned to where she had pointed and
couldn’t make out anything more than an opening in the trees. He marked it in his mind and turned back into his room to collect his overcoat and gloves. His hand trembled as he reached for his hat and he took a long breath. Calm, he thought to himself. You’ve survived this sort of situation before, you can survive an Arm first contact again.

  Murnau was a beautiful resort town, at least most of the year, overlooking the sapphire-blue waters of the Staffelsee. Today was one of the days in the other part of the year. The sky hovered low overhead, gray, the air cold, and the wind whipped his coat. He passed quaint shops, empty outdoor cafes, and a half dozen little galleries. He had visited most of the galleries yesterday, while he waited for Eissler to show. The gallery with the paintings of Kadinsky and Muenter had been especially pleasant.

  He found the trailhead with some help from a trio of returning hikers, just a few minutes outside of the town, and started out. Murnau possessed a reputation for walking cures, and had, since pre-imperial times. By the time he hiked far enough from town for the traffic noises to fade, the gray sky began to leak a slow drizzle. He glanced down at the muddy path and sighed, and looked up to find Eissler ahead of him. She pointed down an overgrown unmarked path, and disappeared again.

  The West German authorities had warned him about Erica Eissler. They thought she was more than a little strange, and nearly feral. She occasionally killed visitors. The German government made certain he knew he was on his own. Before she began to work for the government, Eissler had preyed on tagged Transforms and survived. To her, he would be little more than bedraggled prey.

  Lucky for him, he was used to being such.

  Eissler wore fur, little patches of furs barely covering her privates. She was lean, about five foot four, not particularly muscular, and her ragged black hair appeared to be hand trimmed by a knife. Without a mirror. She appeared several more times as he puffed and climbed, pointing him farther and farther from the roads and trails.

  Eventually, he found himself at the edge of an overlook, looking out over the forest and town and gray waters of the Staffelsee. Beautiful, but he expected nothing less from a mature Arm. He climbed up on the promontory and sat down on a large rock with a sigh of relief. He felt a good decade older than his fifty-one years, and if he wasn’t so eager to meet Eissler, he would be longing for his soft warm bed. He rubbed his calves and looked out over the little lake and the quaint Bavarian kitsch of Murnau. Munich was off in the far distance, hidden by the mist.

  Eissler sat down about twenty feet away and studied him with a puzzled frown. He hadn’t noticed her arrive. He had a hard time imagining her as a middle-aged concert violinist, her pre-transformation profession. “You are strange,” she said, again in German. Time to ante up. He bet he had information she would consider worth her time. If not, he didn’t think he would need to worry about the long walk back to town.

  “Why strange?” he said, in English. She frowned at his comment, and he repeated the comment in German. He cursed, inside – if the conversation got technical, his spotty German wouldn’t be up to the task.

  “You’re old. My government contacts are all young, healthy, vigorous and well-armed. You don’t even carry a weapon. Do Arms not scare you?”

  “Arms terrify me,” he said in his stumbling German, hoping there was no harm in admitting the truth. “Back in America, I always carry weapons. However, as a guest in the GDR, carrying weapons would be impolite.” Illegal, too. “Also, the weapons don’t protect from the Arms, they protect from the Arms’ enemies. The Arms laugh at my weapons.”

  Eissler vanished. He had been staring straight at her and she had vanished. No one could move that fast. This must be an unfamiliar Transform trick. He turned, slowly, and found her about ten feet behind him, about fifteen feet up in a tree. “Your attitude toward Arms is more realistic than that of the people I deal with,” she said. He decided she was checking him out, in some obscure Arm fashion. She nodded back, confirming to him she possessed the Arm ‘mind reading’ trick. “You don’t fluster easily. I like that. I find it tiring to hold myself back when dealing with normals. Most normals scare too easily. I like being myself.”

  She vanished again and appeared right beside him. She pulled back his left sleeve and studied his left wrist. Her stench, of dirt, sweat, and juice, was incredibly strong, almost overpowering. Her breath stank of rotten meat. Zielinski knew better than to react. She poked at a recent scar on his wrist. “An Arm did this. She was low on juice, angry, and not in control of herself. Young?”

  “Less than six months.”

  “Few have survived my anger.” She snuffled at his wrist, licked her finger, and rubbed the scar. He swore the scar stopped aching, immediately. “Especially in my youth as an Arm. My control is much better now. You have many talents for a normal.” She sniffed around him, appeared on his other side, and inspected his right hand. Glanced at his left hand. “Divorced. No lovers. If you are so brave, why don’t you make love with the Arms who own you? The need is so overwhelming. You can make them happy, bond with them, by loving them.”

  “You have the great lust, as well?” Zielinski asked, not sure how to phrase it properly in German. Talking about Arm sex was, well, embarrassing. And dangerous. He didn’t want to offend her. “So far, all the Arms in America who lived long after they transformed had this great lust, and the others have not,” he said, as carefully as he could.

  “There are variants among the Arms in the States?” She sniffed at his crotch, and then vanished again. “I don’t like this,” she said, her voice now distant. “You scare me, Dr. Zielinski. Arms are not goddesses to you.”

  He paused, thinking about what to say and how best to say what needed to be said. Under no circumstances did he want her to consider him a threat. “I can do you no harm, Erica.” She must have been spooked because he didn’t have an erection. Had she expected to arouse him automatically? “I’m a normal, I have no weapons.”

  No response. He turned. Nothing. He sighed, moved back, and sat on a sofa-sized rock a little under tree-cover, at least out of the direct rain. He waited.

  In an instant, several minutes later, he found himself flat on his back, Erica on top of him, a knife to his throat. “You’re not a fighter,” she said. “Completely not a fighter. Your life is in my hands. I own you.”

  “Two other Arms and many Focuses have claimed me already, Erica.” He must change the subject. He wouldn’t survive where this verbal sequence would lead. “Have you met a Focus?”

  She pressed against him, not answering except with a hiss. “Not fair. You’re no more scared of me than when we first met. Too old for good fucking, too.” He disagreed, but decided not to say anything. “I can tell,” Erica said, with disdain, reading his unspoken response. She straddled him, keeping him immobilized. She unzipped his jacket, undid his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and bared his chest. After taking her knife away from his throat, she swiftly carved four lines on his right breast, drawing blood. An ‘E’ shape. She smiled at his blood, almost as if she half expected him not to bleed.

  She knelt down and licked the blood off his chest. He stopped bleeding immediately, which didn’t make sense. Erica licked her lips, carefully bit her tongue, and ran her bleeding tongue over the cuts she had made. “Now there is a tiny bit of me in you, and you bear my mark.” She kept licking the cuts for about a minute, and as she did, they not only closed up, but began to scar. “Strange. There is a faint taste of old juice in your blood, Henry Zielinski.”

  All right, progress. First contact, and she hadn’t killed him yet. “Some bad government people tried to kill me. They filled me with poison juice from a Monster.” He went on to describe, haltingly, that set of events, including his dealings with Focuses, the Crow and the Crow’s somewhat tamed Chimera.

  “Oh, I like you, Henry,” she said after he finished the story. “I like you a lot. Especially the part about getting rogue government agents trying to kill you. Good man.” She curled up on his chest, her face on his s
kin, and closed her eyes.

  Okay, he asked himself. Now what?

  Well Hank, he told himself, there aren’t many choices, now are there? If an Arm wanted to go to sleep on his chest, he certainly wouldn’t try to stop her.

  Eissler was so different from his Arms. Everything he discovered here would be priceless information to take back home. Keaton and Hancock needed this. Every tidbit he might discover about this radically different kind of Arm would give them that much more to use to ensure their own survival. So many of the Arms died. There were so few of them, they understood so little of what they were, and so many people tried to kill them.

  Short-sighted fools. Transform Sickness would consume the world and humanity would need the Arms if they planned to survive the impending disaster.

  The rain dripped on his face and he watched the sleeping Arm on his chest. She would wake if he moved a muscle. She was so skittish. Why would a predator be so afraid? However, he had often seen skittish young Major Transforms. Somewhere, sometime in the past, evolution built in these skittish instincts as necessary for Major Transform survival. Why?

  Fine downy fur covered the arm resting across his chest, he noted. Blonde, not the black of her hair. What did her fur mean?

  Too many puzzles, not enough answers.

  His eyes drifted shut, and then opened with a start. Going to sleep? Here? He should be freezing cold, with water dripping on him, in the cold wind. He didn’t feel cold. If anything, he was warm. Not hypothermia. Eissler did something to him. Another unknown Arm trick. Making him go to sleep, too…

  He fell asleep.

  When he opened his eyes next, the sun shone through a scattering of grey scudding clouds, the remains of the storm passing to the east. Eissler still curled up on his chest, but as he awoke, she did as well. She stood, stretched, and smiled down at him. “You’re hungry. Let me fix that.” Yes, his stomach was growling with hunger. Fix his hunger?