Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  “Huh. Someone took a small junkyard, removed about half the junk, stole half a trailer park and brought it here, then blew the place up. Took down part of the fence as well.” Matt punched the dashboard once, twice. “Now fucking what?”

  “I think we have a problem, Matt.”

  “No shit.”

  “No, another problem. There’s someone on our roof. My guess is an Arm.” Or a light-weight Chimera. I barely kept from panicking.

  Matt eyed the car roof above him. “How do you know that, Dan?” he said. “You’re crazy paranoid or something.” His voice tried to sound confident, but the situation spooked him, too. We did sit in front of a crime scene. Several pieces of paper nailed to the remains of the fence appeared to be local police crime scene warnings. Keep out. We’ll arrest you for loitering; keep an eye out for us ‘cause we’re coming if you don’t. Whatever.

  “Go. Drive us out of here,” I said. We needed to boogie. “Find me the nearest Transform Clinic.” I remembered seeing the address somewhere in these brochures.

  “Right.” Matt started to shift and tap the accelerator, but the car died. The car died because the driver side door opened, an Arm reached in and removed the keys from the ignition, and turned off the car in the process. Matt yelped and flung himself back at me, letting out a scream. The Arm stood in the opening between the driver’s side door and the car.

  My reaction was Wow! You would think that someone like me, Transform prey for an Arm, would be afraid, terrified, etc., but I reacted differently to this woman. She was beautiful. Entrancing. Dangerous. Think motorcycle mama, about six foot tall in black leather boots. Death on long and slender legs. I even thought I recognized her from the FBI ten most wanted list posters from the post office. I couldn’t remember her name, just that she was the 3rd Arm on the list, right after Keaton the mass murderer and wasshername the California Spree Killer. This Arm specialized in offing FBI agents.

  The Arm grabbed Matt, who pinwheeled his feet for a few seconds before passing out. She didn’t mean to hurt him. Or even scare him much. Matt, though, was high strung. Truthfully, I was surprised he hadn’t panicked himself unconscious before she yanked him out of the car.

  “Out of the car. No funny moves,” the Arm said. To me. Respectful like.

  “Sure. No problem.” I wouldn’t scrape my way out of this mess by being a mouse, or by depending on my Army-trained combat skills. Not against an Arm. “I’m here to see Focus Wendy Mann,” I said as I slowly got out of the car, hands in the air. I turned to face the Arm. “The South Bend Transform Clinic sent me here to join Focus Mann’s household. I…”

  “What the fuck are you, Transform?” As I slowly crept out of the car, the Arm dropped Matt to the ground and backed off about 25 feet. She aimed two foreign-made machine pistols in my direction. H&Ks, VP 70s. Like I was dangerous? I stifled the urge to glance behind me.

  Well, dammit, this was Detroit, the location of the infamous Battle in Detroit. A battle involving the Arms. You needed to be polite when you talked to an Arm. Old style polite.

  “Ma’am, I’m a rare type of Transform termed a Goldilocks. I’m fairly sure I’m no danger…”

  “Haggerty, Betsy Wetsy incoming from your left looking for a midnight snack.” A loud but distant voice. “Protect.”

  While trying to figure out whether the Arm would be protecting me or whether she would be protecting ‘Betsy Wetsy’, Haggerty turned, ran and leapt, and caught another Arm, my guess, and slammed her into Matt’s car. One handed. Her other hand remained on the machine pistol, and the pistol never wavered from being aimed at my head. The body slam stopped the other Arm momentarily, enough for a short growling match to ensue. Two blinks of an eye later, seven Arms now faced me.

  I flattened against the car as best I could. No, I wasn’t scared to death.

  There are no words in any existing language able to describe how scared I was.

  The boss Arm turned to her number two Arm and said “Carol, since you’re familiar with this thing, you handle him.” Right. Carol whatshername the California Spree Killer. My only hope was that they would fight each other for me like in a bad movie and I would be able to escape in the fracas.

  The number four Arm and the number three Arm, the one that grabbed Matt, talked to each other, and they indeed referred to the Arm who wanted to snack on me as Betsy Wetsy. Fucking unbelievable. Betsy Wetsy as an Arm name? I wished Matt remained conscious. He would never believe this.

  “Hey, kid. Pay attention.”

  Yah, woolgathering. Panic always made my mind go sideways. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “To a mature Arm, you aren’t juice fodder, tagged or not,” Ms. Spree Killer said. She also towered over me, some mind trick as my eyes tracked her nose without needing to look up. She was all razor-stropped awareness, reminding me of several Master Sergeants who rained on my parade back in ‘Nam. “Something to do with being a Goldilocks. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t choose to juice suck you, or just kill you. So behave.” I nodded, behaving. “I’m Carol Hancock. You are?”

  “Dan Freeman.”

  “Betsy over there is just a student Arm. Student Arms are uncontrolled enough to try and juice suck Monsters. Whadda you think?”

  “Hazard.”

  “Hazard.” She chucked me on my shoulder as if she was one of the guys. “You walked into a godawful mess here.”

  “Figured that out.”

  “Stay by me unless the Boss over there orders otherwise.” Arm Keaton. Arm Hancock turned to the Arm who grabbed me. “Haggerty? You still itching to leave?”

  She nodded. “You don’t need me here. The Feebs didn’t do this, someone else did.”

  “So, are you up for delivering junior here to Rizzari?” Arm Keaton said. “A friendly Goldilocks is on her big reward list. I’ll match whatever reward she gives you.”

  Friendly? There are unfriendly ones? They can’t be afraid of me, can they? My life-as-a-normal instincts demanded I have a say in this. However, my other instincts, these new ones, said ‘trust and obey these Arms’. Especially Arm Hancock.

  “Something’s still not right here,” Arm Hancock said. “My gut’s still doing Enkidu-level flip flops. We need to leave. Let Focus Rickenbach and her people take Dan and protect him until you’re ready to donate him to Lady Death.” She motioned her eyes to the left, and a hundred and twenty feet away, low and behold, stood the fucking most beautiful young woman in the world, flanked by fuck-all menacing bodyguards. I hadn’t seen them before. How did I miss them?

  The Focus caught my attention, winked at me and waved.

  I turned to Haggerty, the number three Arm, to politely ask her what the fuck? She grabbed me first, making me hers. More instincts. She didn’t stand beside me anymore, though. As I turned, the boss Arm snuck up on me, pinning me between her and Hancock. “You should fear me,” she said, from about eighteen inches away. Total surprise. My heart rate doubled, my knees went wobbly, and I fought panic. These new instincts told me not to run. Under no circumstances, no running.

  “Ma’am Keaton,” I said. “I am afraid of you. I’m just a male Goldilocks. Nothing else.” My voice trembled as I choked out the words.

  “Fuck,” Ma’am Keaton said. “That’s the neatest trick I’ve seen in a month. Freeman, you were supposed to die of fear shock, or at least pass out. I could use some people like you in my organization.” She too clapped me on the shoulder, removed me from Arm Hancock’s side and tossed me to Haggerty. “Catch!” she said. “He’s all yours.”

  I flew through the air. Twenty five feet. Fucking unbelievable.

  Arm Haggerty was going to catch me. I fervently prayed that the shock of having to do this would not trigger Arm Haggerty’s juice-sucking instincts. Did I panic a little? Yes. Well, only a little.

  Haggerty caught me and put me down, hardly laying a hand on me. Amazing. Nearly as unbelievable as the toss.

  “You’ve run into these things before, Ma’am Hancock?” Haggerty said to her boss,
after stashing me to the side and putting a hand-lock on my shoulder.

  “Yes. One of the more obnoxious events of the past couple of years.”

  “You vouch for these things being harmless, Ma’am Hancock?”

  “This one is. The one I met wasn’t. You were out of the country at the time – the guy I ran into was old as sin, spoke like my great grandmother, and said he belonged to the Command Evaluation Network. I couldn’t do a fucking thing with him save wait him out.”

  The low ranking Arm, Betsy Wetsy, recovered her equilibrium, and started to come after me in a gliding sliding way. Almost like a housecat going after a sparrow. She tried to evade my sight, but I followed her, unlike the other Arms.

  “Ma’am,” I said, and almost tugged on Haggerty’s leather. Instinct stopped me. Instead, I turned to Arm Haggerty’s boss (how did I know that?), Arm Hancock, and stared at her.

  Haggerty slammed a kick into Betsy Wetsy, and then pinwheeled and tossed the young Arm in Ma’am Keaton’s direction. Ma’am Keaton didn’t bother catching the young Arm. Instead, she crossed her arms and glared death and torture at Haggerty as Betsy Wetsy skidded to a stop at her feet.

  “Despite what it may appear, Haggerty, he isn’t a Major Transform.” Hancock. She sounded pissed and annoyed to still be here at the target of whatever hell was about to descend on us. “Wonder-Focus over there confirms both. He doesn’t need juice, nor does he generate extra juice. He needs tagging for political reasons. He can’t sense juice at all, but can figure out who ranks who instinctively. That isn’t a sense, though. He can’t figure out rank if he can’t see you. He’s as trainable as a male Transform, but he can be trained faster than a male Transform. He likely possesses, or will possess, unique Transform tricks, dangerous tricks because they’re unfamiliar.”

  Gee, thanks. Arm Hancock deserved her forceful reputation. Arm Keaton did fear quite well. Arm Hancock did terror, the sort of thing that made me want to go hide in the back of the car under a blanket. An hour with her and I wouldn’t have a secret left.

  Haggerty remained beautiful.

  “Oh, one other thing,” Ma’am Hancock said. “Goldilocks are fully fertile with everyone.”

  Arm Keaton interrupted her and made tut tut signs at the Focus with her fingers. “Not for you, Gail. Too much of a distraction.”

  Arm Hancock continued. “That’s their real point to their existence, according to Focus Rizzari.”

  Haggerty fixed me with her gaze. Before my mind properly engaged, I saluted and said “Yes, sir!” Where did that come from? “Ma’am.” I expected she would kill or maim me for my slip.

  Funny thing, although Keaton snickered, none of the other Arms did. Haggerty smiled. She liked my reaction.

  “Ma’am, where does this information come from?” Haggerty said, to Hancock.

  “I figured it out,” Hancock said. She appeared on the top of the remains of Focus Mann’s junkyard fence. She didn’t lose her balance and the fence didn’t buckle. I hadn’t seen her move. She raised her hands to the sky as if pleading for deliverance from God. “Oh, and he’s part of your quest.”

  Quest?

  “No quest right now,” Keaton said. “Not until we figure out what’s going on here.” She turned to me. “Hancock’s right. Go to the Focus. She’ll tag you. Don’t make her pregnant. We’ll return for you, later.”

  I began to walk over to the Focus before I realized. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. Fuck.

  Gail Rickenbach: October 8, 1971

  “I’m tagged?” the man, Dan, asked. Gail nodded, still not sure what to make of the guy, other than the fact he was about as screwy a Transform as she had ever metasensed, and that he was a bit on the short side for a guy. Her height. Thin and wiry. His movements were overly precise, which triggered her instincts enough so that she kept an eye on him.

  “I didn’t feel a thing. That isn’t at all what the brochures said.”

  “Don’t trust anything the brochures say,” Anita said. She took an instant liking to Dan, normally not her style. Gail put Gilgamesh in the front seat along with Kurt and Vic; Valerie, Anita, Gail and Dan were crammed four across in the back seat, possible only thanks to their narrow hips. Anita partly sat on Valerie’s lap. Gail hadn’t introduced Gilgamesh or said he was a Crow.

  “I could experiment with you and see how you react to juice moving,” Gail said. Dan, no last name yet, was a good looking young man with a narrow face, straight dark brown to almost black hair worn in a partly grown out military haircut, ragged clothes and beaten up shoes. His brother, who they sent off, with relief, back to wherever he came from, had been similarly dressed. Their car would have fit in with Gail’s household’s vehicles.

  “No, not today.”

  “Smart man,” Valerie said. “So, Gail, what exactly is going on here?”

  “I’m not sure,” Gail said. “Dan’s supposedly a Goldilocks.” She explained everything she understood on the subject, which wasn’t much. She didn’t believe the ‘all benefits no detriments’ crap the brochures said. She never believed those brochures. She wouldn’t say anything, yet, but she kept an eye out for the detriments. “Making a few guesses and reading between the lines, I suspect Dan will end up tagged by any Focus household he deals with.”

  “I’m not going to be confined to a single household?” Dan said. “Do they actually let Transforms have jobs?” Definitely a baby Transform.

  “Some places will hire Transforms,” Anita said. “Some won’t. Most don’t check, which can lead to some interesting problems. You’re going to make a good resource if you stick around.”

  “Resource?” Dan shivered and buried his feelings. Gail wasn’t sure she had ever met a Transform harder to read, emotionally. Generally, the only people she couldn’t read were senior Major Transforms. Tagging him didn’t help. “So I’m enslaved?” Unhappy. That was easy to read.

  “No more than any other Transform or Major Transform,” Anita said. “You’re less naturally enslaved than most – for instance, I can’t go more than two weeks away from here without coming back home, to keep from going Monster. And that’s pushing it.” Was she flirting with him? Yes. Was it a juice trick on his part?

  Gail gave it some thought, and some extra metasense, and decided he gave off natural ‘trust me’ vibes at the juice level, similar to what Crows did when they behaved, but using a radically different method. “Anita, Dan transformed fairly recently, in the 2nd week of September. Be kind to him. New Transforms are always more fragile.”

  Dan put his head in his hands and moaned, head-spun.

  Gail didn’t blame him. Being abused by an Arm pack wasn’t easy for anyone.

  ---

  “Put your guns on the floor,” Nancy said, her voice artificially forceful, buoyed by her previously hidden Focus-like charisma. She held a pistol to Sylvie’s head, had stripped Sylvie down to periwithdrawal, and left the dross on Sylvie as a further threat. “Now!” Nancy’s hand shook, Sylvie’s pistol in it.

  Gail charismatically projected a calm she didn’t feel herself. Nancy had waited until Gail was on the way through the front door of the apartment complex before she stripped Sylvie and took her sidearm from her. “Nancy, what’s going on?” Gail asked. Now they all gathered in the drafty entryway to deal with this. Gail wanted to smack the damned bitch. Instead, she controlled her temper and tried to put herself in Nancy’s position.

  “You fucking sold me out!”

  “I didn’t say anything about you, and the Arms didn’t ask.”

  “The Arms know about me and they’re going to come here to kidnap me and make me go on that damned mission with them,” she said. “I won’t let them. Put down your guns!”

  Kurt, Vic and Valerie’s eyes flickered to Gail, who indicated they should obey. “Kick them away,” Nancy said. They obeyed, firearms skittering across the worn linoleum. “Now you’re going to take me to the airport and buy me a ticket.” For a waif in badly fitting clothing she had ‘pissed Focus’ down cold.r />
  Gilgamesh finger wiggled at Gail, indicating he could take Nancy out and save Sylvie. Gail signaled back that she could do so as well. She hadn’t, yet, because she understood Nancy’s worries.

  Unless Nancy possessed a counter-trick, though, she was going to find it difficult to fire the pistol she held at Sylvie’s head. Paralyzing nerves was an old trick of Gail’s.

  “I hear you,” Gail said. “I also understand your fears. Let’s go somewhere and talk. If you aren’t comfortable talking here, there’s always the courtyard.”

  “You’re always the reasonable one,” Nancy said. Her hand shook even more. “But I’m the one with the helpless hostage. To your car. Now.” Nancy had killed before, but never in cold blood, like this. She wasn’t sure she could do it, something Gail counted on.

  “Only one of the Arms thinks the quest is worth doing, ma’am,” Dan said.

  Crap. The other new idiot had decided to interfere. Gail almost dropped him to the floor before deciding to see what happened.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Nancy asked.

  “Dan Freeman.” Finally, a last name. “Apparently, a fellow involuntary member of whatever this quest is.”

  “No, what are you?”

  “The Transform Clinic said I was a Goldilocks,” Dan said. Interesting phrasing, there. Gail was impressed; his voice and demeanor radiated utter calm, but inside, he was about to fall apart.

  He’s one of us, Gail finger-wagged at Gilgamesh. ‘One of us’ meaning a member of the best of their variety of Transform. It had been both a blessing and a curse for both Gilgamesh and her.

  Uh huh, Gilgamesh finger waggled back. Poor guy.

  “You feel the call?”

  “You mean this ‘oh my God I need to do this or else’ feeling? I hadn’t, not until I met you, ma’am.”

  “Put down the pistol and I won’t punish or harm you,” Gail said, catching Nancy’s eyes. Their Focus charismas dueled for a moment, Nancy’s panic rising nearly to her breaking point. “You’re not alone any more.” And I am your master.