“Hank!”
Hank blinked himself out of his reading trance. The Focus sat close to him in the back of the sixteen foot long truck Inferno used on its Monster hunts, amid standard supplies, contingency supplies, emergency supplies, and a dozen Inferno Monster hunters. She had been invading his personal space ever since he and Lisa found each other and started to share Fridays together. Given Lori’s Friday preferences, he now understood her earlier reluctance to get close to him. Now, she treated him the same way she treated any other normal member of the Inferno household.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’re getting close?” The truck was doing a bit too much bouncing for them to be on a paved road. “Tell me, how can a Noble able to put together a paper like this” worthy of a third or fourth year college student “not have a Noble household?”
“Because he’s able to put together a paper like this,” Lori said, exasperated. “Eventually the Nobles will lose the meathead jock mentality. The sooner the better.” He nodded, remembering one of Carol’s comments about Duke Hoskins’ ego issues, smarmy superiority complex and Carol’s urge to stick a knife in his intestines whenever he said anything that wasn’t business.
“The Crows say the Hunters are far worse.”
“The Hunters have male superiority hard-wired into the Law, something Carol’s working on fixing as we speak.”
“She’s started the war? Why aren’t you there?” Three different Inferno heads turned toward them at Hank’s words. A moment later, the whispers started their progression from one ear to the next. The Commander’s activities always mattered to Inferno.
“She hasn’t started the war. She’s in Chicago, doing detailed espionage.” Lori sighed and lowered her voice. “I’m stuck guarding her mind in the Dreaming every night. I just wish she could get over her Dreaming phobias. Life would get so much easier for all of us.”
“Us?”
“Forget I said anything,” Lori said, a smile in her voice. She leaned against him and looked over his shoulder at his reading material. “Our target, a Mantisoid the authorities call the Mianus River Gorge Monster, has been eating dogs, cattle and the occasional person for ten years, despite several attempts to flush her out of her hiding place in the gorge.”
“This is in Connecticut?”
“Her territory is in both New York and Connecticut.”
“That’s a bit close to New York City for a Monster.”
“You would be surprised how wild that part of New York State is.”
He snorted, visualizing a ‘gorge’ twenty feet deep at most, across a quarter mile wide valley, with large homes and large lots on either side of the gorge. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out this is a hoax. Or a human killer’s burial ground.”
She laughed. “Fifty bucks says we find a Monster.”
“You’re on.”
They clambered down the slope to the gorge bottom, where the Mianus flowed, a minor river flowing down a straight gorge. Here, the gorge was perhaps fifty feet deep, but the Mianus had carved its way through a low mountain just to the south of here. There, at Rock Hill, the gorge was 250 feet deep. He had been correct about the homes and large lots, only to find many had been abandoned in the last several years.
Eaten out.
There was even one nasty looking several acre burn scar to the north of Rock Hill, where the authorities had tried and failed to burn out the Monster.
A whistle turned their heads. Two, no, three figures waited in the shadows of a thick copse of maples, just leafing out in pale spring green. “Finally,” Lori said. Hank followed the Inferno crew down a tributary valley and up the other side, invigorated by the exercise. He couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day – bright April sun, fresh air, and spring temperature in the high fifties, cool enough for exercise to feel good. To the left, above the gorge, sat the wreckage of a small mansion, the swimming pool filled with watery debris and with saplings growing in the remains of the nearest room.
“Viscount Dowling at your service, Focus Queen Rizzari,” the tall man – well, Noble – said, after stepping out of the shadows. Two Monsters accompanied him, controlled or tamed or something, a panther-shaped Felinoid and a chimp-like Ape. They eyed Hank with far too intelligent eyes.
“I’m glad you could make the party, Viscount,” Lori said. She walked up to the Noble, who held out his hand. Lori took it and sniffed it, then held out her hand for the Noble to do the same. Hank hadn’t seen this ritual before. He had definitely been spending too much time in Los Angeles. “You do understand that this is a delicate and violent mission, a bit on the icky side, don’t you?”
“I haven’t forgotten.” The Viscount stood just under seven feet tall, mostly because he was hunched over and not standing up straight. His nose and mouth protruded forward and looked vaguely ursanoid. The backs of his hands were noticeably furry. For a man-shape, the Viscount missed the mark in many areas. “I metasense no Monster here, nor smell her. I found many of her footprints, though.”
“Scent masking, too? No wonder she’s survived this long.”
“She rests here often, but she’s not here now,” Viscount Dowling said. He had led them down into the gorge, and down river, to a bedrock overhang. To Hank, the area in question looked like typical gorge-bottom, the area the Viscount pointed to a typical area choked with suburban trash and flood-deposited snags among the gorge’s more natural rocks and boulders. “This is the last of the hiding places I’ve been able to find.” The Viscount had scouted the area ahead of time, waiting for their arrival. Ann Chiron, the leader of the Inferno team, motioned for them to fall back to an open area in the gorge, about five hundred feet back. She called over Rose Marie, Steve and Antonio, and pulled out the topo map. The Viscount peered at them, pointed to his eyes, and backed off.
Hank walked over, glad of his jacket now that he wasn’t climbing over rocks and through weeds. “Viscount Dowling, my name is Henry Zielinski.” The panther and the ape walked over to him and studied him as he spoke. “I read your paper on Monster varieties. It’s amazing.”
The Noble peered down at him. “You’re the Good Doctor, aren’t you?” he said. Hank nodded. “Thank you. I hadn’t imagined anyone of your stature in the community would read my work. Isn’t what’s in my paper already known to you?”
“Not in the detail you presented, your grace,” Hank said. “Can you tell me how you differentiated between the Monster types? We thought there were twenty one varieties.”
“By the smell of their élan,” the Viscount said. “It’s distinctive if you know what to sniff for, my Good Doctor.”
Ann put away the map. “Viscount? Which of the ruined homes around here have basements?”
Of course. Man-made caves for shelter.
“Get her within a hundred yards of me!” Lori shouted. No answer. “I’m over here! Darn it, someone hold me up so they can see me.” She stood on a rock outcropping in the back yard of what had once been a very expensive home, but the trees below rose too high and interfered with the view.
None of Lori’s two guards or three support people moved to follow the wishes of the Focus, who crossed her arms in frustration. Hank attempted to follow the chase below, which wound its way down into the gorge and up the other side. The mantisoid Monster was a nightmare creature, nine feet long and, truthfully, not very insectoid. His best mental analogy was of an oversized beetle with short thick legs. And lungs. And a furry cat tail. When hunting Monsters, one needed to remember that they were fully mammalian and warm blooded, supercharged by élan, and that they acted that way. Otherwise, it was too easy to make a dangerous mistake.
Across the gorge, the Monster skittered up a tree and leapt to another, a half-dead spruce. The Monster’s weight cracked the spruce, but she was off on another leap, flapping her mostly useless cockroach-style wings to slow her fall and adjust her aim mid-leap. She landed part way up an oak tree that leaned out over the gorge.
Anticipating, the Viscount waited for he
r in the tree. He barked out a Terror-roar that would make a King Kong sized grizzly bear proud and swatted at the Monster, in an attempt to immobilize her. The Monster eviscerated him for his efforts and made a blind leap across the gorge in an attempt to escape.
Lori had sprinted away from Hank the moment the Viscount showed himself up in the tree. Hank followed at a careful walk. The Focus didn’t confine herself to the snag-infested ground, instead running over the snags and pinwheeling off and around branches in a way matching her Crow name, the Gymnast. Lori reached the gorge edge while the Monster remained in mid-leap; the Monster yowled in terror and flapped her thin wings in panic to avoid falling into Lori’s range. No such luck. Another second and the Monster’s wings stopped and she quieted, held in place by one of Lori’s potent juice patterns. The Monster fell to the bottom of the gorge, Lori leaping behind her to keep within range, all amid the curses and catcalls of her bodyguards, who hadn’t been able to keep up with their Focus.
Much later, after Hank clambered down to the gorge bottom, Lori raised up her hand, palm up, to him. He slapped two twenty dollar bills and a ten into her hand without comment.
“Anyone want to lend me a hand?” the Viscount said, calling out from his perch forty feet up a tree, on the far side of the gorge. “Oh, and Good Doctor, what’s the recommended procedure for untangling guts from tree branches?”
“This is too ghoulish for me,” the Viscount said, looking up at Hank from his emergency hospital bed of a single flat rock cleared of pebbles. His blood soaked the knees of Hank’s pants. “I know that legally and morally we can’t keep her – she’s responsible for well over thirty deaths. But, still.” The ape Monster, Diane, nodded, and tugged at the Viscount’s shirt sleeve. She wanted out of there, too. Oh, and she understood English just fine.
“It troubles me as well,” Hank said, lying. The only thing that troubled him was that he was stuck fixing up the Viscount while his real task, setting up his equipment, awaited him. Given Chimera healing, anyone could have done what Hank was stuck doing – washing the dirt off the intestines, shoving them back inside the Viscount, and sewing up the Monster’s gouges. “There you go. As fixed up as you need to be.”
“Thank you, sir,” the Viscount said. “It’s an honor to be stitched up by the Good Doctor.” Which explained everything. Hank wondered if the Viscount allowed the Monster to injure him just for this ‘honor’.
Hank swung the hammer and the Monster’s forearm shell cracked open; he stuck in a spreader and opened the arm wide. Perfect. Functional veins, arteries and lymph nodes. He took a tissue sample of the creature’s muscles and took tissue samples from the lymph node and ancillary tissue on the inside of the Monster’s shell. He tapped an artery and a vein, and stepped back to his sampling apparatus, where he would be able to get ongoing blood samples. “Wake her up, Lori, if you please. I need my waking baseline samples.” The Focus did as asked. The Monster thrashed and howled, but the restraints held.
“Good enough,” he said. “Kill her.” They had discussed this for over an hour, finally deciding on decapitation as the only way to guarantee an élan explosion. They had counted on the Viscount doing the honor, but instead Steve got to swing the sword. Several times.
Sky, who appeared only after they immobilized the Monster, took notes on what he metasensed. “Remind me not to get you annoyed at me, Doc. Ever,” he said. “You might want to step back. Élan is dangerous.”
“I know,” Hank said, his hands and arms beginning to feel tingly and hot from the now dead Monster’s élan. “I need just one more sample.” He stepped back and joined Steve under the impromptu shower set up to wash off the élan contamination, shivering at the frigid water. Blood dripped down the rocky slope as it washed from Hank’s clothes, from both the Viscount and the Monster. Sky said he could clean the rest of the mess off them without any problems, but only after they showered.
Even beheaded, the Monster continued to thrash for half an hour. Hank changed into his spare clothes as they waited, and took advantage of an offered blanket to wrap around his shoulders. “Despite what it appears, she’s beyond saving,” the Viscount said. “Yes, you could put her head back on her body, and she would in time regrow a new spinal cord, but she wouldn’t have any mind left. We don’t know how to fix that problem, yet, and Master Occum thinks it may be impossible.”
“Here,” Sky said, growling like an angry Chimera. He handed Hank the metasense records of the élan explosion. “I hope this helps.”
Hank looked at Sky’s notes, and shook his head at the unexpected data. “This isn’t good. This isn’t good at all.”
---
“I can finally tell you what’s been going on,” Lori said. She sat down beside him in her basement lab. He smiled at her, leaned back and stretched while still sitting. His joints crackled from too much time in one position, and the chair creaked with the strain. Two weeks of work and he was within a few days of being finished with the data analysis. He just needed to do another pass on the post-mortem tissue samples to double check his discoveries.
“What’s been going on about what?” he asked.
“Why Carol dropped you here. What she’s been up to.”
“Oh, right,” he said. This wasn’t his home, not really. “I’ve gotten comfortable here. It’s going to be hard to leave.”
“Too many Friday nights?”
He nodded.
She smiled. “Carol, Gilgamesh and Arm Haggerty are scouting Chicago. On the ground, invisible and metasense masked. They’re searching out every trap, stronghold and building the Hunters use, mapping them, and delivering the maps to Stacy. Stacy’s calling in all the Arms’ political chits and getting Tonya to lean on the Focus Council to provide us an army – mostly from the Council Members’ private armies, with a few extra strong households thrown in for good measure. Focus Caruthers is doing the logistics, and Inferno and I are leaving tonight. Carol’s got a battle plan that makes me glad she’s on our side. The Hunter war starts tomorrow.”
“Perfect!” Hank said. “I’ll be packed in…”
“You’re staying here. In the basement safe room complex, under guard,” Lori said. “At least one Focus with leaky nighttime thoughts thinks this would be a perfect time to rid the world of your presence. A chaotic war situation would be perfect for that.”
“But…”
Lori shook her head and pointed at the concrete floor. “Here.”
He sighed. “Fine.” He could feel the headache already starting from the Focus charisma abuse. “On that wonderful note, here’s something even worse,” he said. “An unexpected problem’s shown up in the élan explosion test results. One requiring more data.”
“I’m not sure we can do that one again, Hank. I don’t think the Nobles and Crows will stand for it. I know Sky won’t.”
“We may need to, just to make sure this wasn’t a fluke,” Hank said. “However, simply having Sky recording his metasense readings in the upcoming fight will likely be enough. I assume he’s going with you?”
“I would say he’s going with the Inferno team, but, yes. He won’t be overjoyed, but if I sell it to him as a way to avoid another Monster kill mission, he’ll do it.” She paused. “But what you really mean is that there’s something screwy going on with élan explosions.”
He nodded. He leafed through his papers until he found a pile of graphs. “This is what we expected for élan compound 31, what the Crows term ‘essence of Skunking’ and the most active of the élan mélange.” Compound 31, when exposed to juice, turned juice fraction 7, the 2nd most active juice fraction, into more compound 31, until fraction 7 was reduced to a quarter of what was normal. Compound 31 was how Crow skunking did its worst.
His graph showed a tilted bell curve that swiftly rose to a flattish maximum, about five seconds into the élan explosion, and then slowly decayed for the next ten minutes, when it vanished into the background.
“This is what we found.” He showed the Focus a different cu
rve, one with a sharp spike, off the top of the graph, right at time zero. The spike decayed rapidly, matching up with the first curve after five seconds.
The Focus tapped her finger on the graph thoughtfully. “So this is what Sky means about the ‘metasense flash’ that happens during an élan explosion. However, for the induced transformation numbers, the spike won’t matter. That’s governed by the integral, the area under the curve.” The total dross contamination of an area after an élan explosion, the fourth most important term in the sum of factors associated with regional induced transformation numbers.
“That’s what I thought until I ran this through the secondary induced transformation factor sum,” Hank said. He moved papers until he found his calculation notebook. He opened it to the appropriate page and showed the Focus.
“Fruiting fudge!” she said. “We’re screwed.”
“Oh, like that’s never happened before.” Sky. Invisible. Following Lori, maybe, or watching Hank in his lab, just hanging around. “Explain it in tiny words for those of us with walnuts for brains.”
The Focus turned and put her hands on her hips, glaring at nothing. “Secondary induced transformations – remember what those are?”
“Nope, oh most gracious lady.”
“It’s an induced transformation that occurs just because you’re standing next to an induced transformation.”
“Which has to do with élan explosions how?”
She shook her head. “We’re working on figuring out how many induced transformations occur because of an élan explosion,” she said. She spoke as if she was explaining ‘up’ and ‘down’ to a dim ten year old. “One of the five ways we know of to produce an élan explosion is during a failed induced transformation. What Hank here’s discovered is that élan explosions from failed induced transformations cause a far greater number of secondary induced transformations, because of the darned élan spike we just discovered. In a crowded urban area, an actual chain reaction is possible.”
Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Page 10
