Now We Are Monsters (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  Interesting read. Just before the dinner meeting, Suzie Schrum had lowered the hammer on Focus Ellen O’Donnell. Tonya didn’t know what Ellen had done to merit such attention, but Suzie had picked Ellen out as a target months ago. Unfortunately, Tonya couldn’t do anything to save Ellen from Suzie’s sick bully games, at least in public.

  Ellen was at least a stiff-backed bitch. She would prove difficult for Suzie to control, and the more work Suzie had to do, the better.

  “Some Focuses consider Suzie to be a cream puff, compared to me, Focus Rizzari or Focus Ackerman,” Tonya said. They were right, too. Suzie had to resort to evil to compensate for what she lacked in talent and spine.

  Gerry blanched. “Ma’am.”

  “Out with it. I’m not going to bite.” In Tonya’s opinion, Gerry was a natural as a Focus. Sure, she had been a housewife before her transformation, but she had also been a successful Avon Lady and was getting a pain-free divorce from her husband which would end up with her household collecting substantial alimony payments. If Gerry had any faults, it was that she wasn’t a hard case. No, that wasn’t quite right: she wasn’t enough of a hard case. Her household of seven triads of Transforms and their desultory spouses and children certainly knew who was boss.

  “I’d never want to cross you, ma’am, but strength doesn’t make you evil,” Gerry said. Tonya nodded. “Focus Rizzari is a bit scary because she’s a Professor. Intimidating, not evil. Focus Ackerman seemed pleasant to me.” Delia Vinote knocked at the door and came in bearing kitchen gifts – in this case, leftover cupcakes from one of the household children’s birthday celebration and an as-yet-unsampled fresh-from-the-oven gooey coffeecake wafting the warm scent of cinnamon through the small room. The coffeecake was Delia’s specialty and the cause of some recent weight gain among the kitchen staff. Gerry and Tonya thanked Delia as Delia left the room with ample grace.

  “Flo is a sneaky conniving politician with a large organization. She’s someone you want to befriend, if you can. She plays favorites, and I’m glad I figured that out years ago and made friends with her,” Tonya said. She narrowed her eyes as she cut two generous pieces of the coffee cake. “I happen to share your opinion of Focus Schrum, but you do need to know she’s my boss. In public, I can’t afford to go against her.”

  “I understand.” Behind Gerry’s eyes, Tonya caught Gerry’s sudden desire to move her household to a different Region. Such a move would be an economic calamity.

  Tonya handed Gerry one of the pieces of cake on a plate. “However, I can provide political cover for you, if you want,” she said.

  “I want,” Gerry said, with palpable relief.

  “You may not like some of the costs involved. For one thing, it will mean keeping your head down, both politically and economically.”

  “Economically?”

  “Suzie earns her money by extorting East Region households who can afford to pay.” Such as Tonya’s household. “As I’ve said before, the first Focuses run the Focus Council from behind the scenes at the moment. Someday they won’t. What I want, for helping you, is for you to prepare for that day. Prepare to support me. I’m sure you have it in you to be one of the more successful Focuses.”

  Gerry nodded. “You’re offering me some sort of training?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tonya, I can’t. I…”

  “You don’t want to be so heavily in my debt, do you?” Tonya said. Most young Focuses wouldn’t catch that until far too late. Gerry did, instantly. Tonya smiled, pleased.

  Gerry studied her feet. “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

  “I understand, but you’re going to be in my debt no matter what if I provide cover for you.” Tonya paused. “There are other possibilities which can make this more of an equitable partnership, but they wouldn’t be right for me to suggest. You’ll have to think them up yourself and volunteer.” Such as the obvious thing to do with Gerry’s household’s excess money: give it to Tonya. Tonya despised the blackmail game many of the other senior Focuses played with the younger Focuses, but Gerry wouldn’t be the first Focus to offer to pay Tonya for some of Tonya’s services. After the emergency trip to Kansas City, her household could use the extra money. “Take some time, think everything over.”

  Gerry nodded. “Thank you, Tonya. I will.” She licked her lips. “I have another question. What’s with Focus Rizzari’s women bodyguards?”

  One thing about Rizzari, she had found a way to proselytize without any of the overt advertising the first Focuses had prohibited. “She was a champion Prep School gymnast before she transformed, and…”

  There was a knock at the door. Tonya used her metasense to identify the knocker as Rhonda, her house secretary, with a note in her hand. The note represented an emergency, or Rhonda would have handled it herself.

  “Excuse me, Gerry, but something’s come up.”

  Tonya opened the door, took the note from Rhonda, and frowned. Keaton, after months spent dodging Tonya’s phone messages, wanted to talk to Tonya over the phone. Now. In person. At the phone booth outside of the local Kroger.

  Tonya began to sprint, leaving Rhonda to make excuses to Gerry.

  Finally.

  “It’s a juice effect!” Keaton said, after Tonya picked up the pay phone on the third ring. Keaton disguised her voice a South Philly thug, but Tonya recognized it anyway.

  Tonya swore to herself as she shut the phone booth door behind her with still-sticky fingers. For four solid months, she hadn’t managed to extract any information at all about what was going on in Keaton’s world. Now this.

  “What’s a juice effect?”

  “Arm charisma, oh great nasty one. Hancock figured it out.”

  Oh. “I could have told you that.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed you if you did.” Pause. “Hah! Even better, we get our charisma, what Hancock calls the predator effect, only six months in.” It normally took Focuses two to three years before their charisma came in.

  She found Keaton’s terminology tiresome: prey, predator, hunt, stalk, now predator effect. It was almost as if Keaton wanted to define herself as a wild beast.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Oh, you’ve seen it. For instance…GROWL.”

  Tonya caught herself before she stepped back from the phone, which wouldn’t have done any good. She couldn’t keep her arm hairs from standing up on end, though.

  “Okay, I’ve seen it.” Too often, actually. “It’s when you remind me you’re a killer.”

  “It’s when I remind you I’m a predator.”

  Tonya took a deep calming breath. “So, other than your discovery, how goes your teaching?”

  Keaton, to Tonya’s surprise, turned loquacious and bent Tonya’s ear for a half hour. She had to be juiced up now, the only time the Arm ever got chatty. Arm teaching turned out to be rough stuff, but nothing more than Tonya expected. “Arms don’t naturally get along with each other. It wasn’t until I got Hancock to understand her inner self, what she calls her beast, that we’ve settled into a more natural teacher-student relationship.”

  Things clicked in Tonya’s head. “This is recent, isn’t it. Such as after a certain kill-spree in California?” Last week’s California Spree Killer episode shouted ‘Arm’ to Tonya, making her wonder if Keaton had regressed. She hadn’t considered the possibility Hancock was the perpetrator. Keaton hadn’t had the skill to do anything of the sort as a young Arm.

  “I’m not saying a word.” Confirmation.

  So Keaton’s psychotic nature wasn’t a personal flaw, but something all the Arms shared? Tonya grimaced in disgust.

  “I’d say, then, you’re doing a bang up job at training Hancock. How many more of these shopping sprees of hers is she going to do, anyway, before she’s sated?”

  Keaton laughed. “I’m not answering that, either, bitch. I will say you won’t be seeing any more of them, though.”

  Implying that Keaton still did ultra-violent kill sprees but had gotten much better at c
overing them up…and that she would teach Hancock how to do the same. Crap.

  “You do remember the point of this is to be training Hancock to work for…”

  “Goddamned motherfucking cunt! Whether she works for your bitch patrol or not will be her choice.” Growl. Slam of the phone on the other end of the line.

  Tonya sighed.

  Arms.

  Chapter 3

  Arms are dangerous because they must kill to survive. To survive, they require juice. To get juice, they must kill. After an Arm has killed many times, killing becomes just another thing she does. Most like to kill, and would do so as often they could, just for fun – save for the existence of the other Major Transforms. A region with just one Arm as the only Major Transform would not be a pleasant place in which to live.

  “The Book of Arms”

  Carol Hancock: March 27, 1967 – March 28, 1967

  Keaton came back from her hunt after five days, four days later than a good hunt should require. Luckily for me, she came back juiced up. Five days of unsuccessful hunting would leave her in one of her dark, quiet, and supremely dangerous moods. As it was, she came back with an unexpected present for me.

  “Oh, Carol! Lookie lookie!”

  She dragged four large hanger-boxes out of the back of the panel truck she must have stolen, opened one and pulled out a Catholic school-girl uniform. My size. Just wonderful.

  “You wanted to make sure we couldn’t mistake you for anything but a student, right?” She noticed the expression on my face and laughed uproariously.

  “Ma’am,” I said. “Thank you.” I didn’t even try to sound like I meant it.

  It didn’t matter now. Keaton, high on juice, was beyond noticing.

  I couldn’t imagine how she managed to find any of these in my current size; she must have made a special order. The quantity I understood – I would be going through the damn things like tissue paper. Yes, when she put me through my exercises and my weapons training, I wore the uni dutifully. It even stayed whole until I lost control during a tightrope and gunfire training episode and flashed annoyance at Keaton, triggering one of our usual fights, leaving me beat up and humbled. The rest of the day I wore the uniform’s remains.

  After my most excellent dinner, of prime rib, haricort verts, Yorkshire pudding and fresh cherry pie, Keaton chose the evening’s entertainment. Me. Fairly standard for Keaton with high juice.

  “Let’s play surgeon!” she said. My heart rate spiked, but I clamped down on any further reactions before they showed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said I. Petty sadism, only her game appeared to be more serious on the damage end than normal. I predicted a rough evening, and I didn’t look forward to it. However, I wanted to try something this time; not to convince Keaton to stop this practice, which would have been futile, but to focus it a bit more.

  Back before California, I had to tie myself down when she played her torture games. Early on, during one of these sessions, while not tied down I lost control and fought Keaton. I had tried a sucker punch. The beating I received left me seeing double for half a day, one of the worst beatings I ever earned.

  Today, as someone who now understood where Keaton the Arm was coming from, I sat on the weight bench in the gym as she indicated and didn’t tie myself down.

  “Dum de dum de dum. Oh, cooperative today, are we?” Keaton said. Today she chose knee surgery. I didn’t comment until she was past the skin cutting and peeling back stage.

  “Owh! I’d rate that a 3.”

  She glared at me, but only for a moment. When she noticed how much attention I paid to her cutting and peeling, she laughed. “Oh, exceptionally cooperative, I see. What’s the scale, cunt?”

  “One isn’t worth a yelp, ma’am. Above five, I’d better have something in my mouth to chew on. A ten should knock me out momentarily.”

  Keaton went for a nerve cluster with a metal probe. Before she struck, I stuck an old leather belt in my mouth to bite on. It tasted of my blood from all its incentive use during gym time. “Owwwh a 9!” I screamed. Damn. I knew this would be hard. I reminded myself firmly there was no avoiding the pain, and giving myself up to it didn’t buy me anything.

  I swore Keaton nearly came from pleasure at my response. I had won my bet with myself: a prediction she would appreciate the cooperation if she had high juice. If I got off on receiving pain, I would have played this quite differently, but as it was…

  “Ma’am,” I said, after I relaxed enough to unclench my jaw. “Which tendon is that, anyway?”

  “Dipshit, that’s a muscle, not a tendon you’re pointing at.” She named it and I thanked her.

  You can turn anything into a lesson. Given she would hurt me in any case, I wanted every ounce of learning possible from the experience.

  Her lessons went on well past midnight. She spent part of the time regaling me with the story of her own recent massacre, brought on by low juice and anger at a flat tire. She had only killed four people, a minor massacre for one of her low juice psychotic episodes. She made it appear to be a murder-suicide, ever the efficient predator. The police and FBI had been hunting her for years and hadn’t caught her or even cornered her in the past two.

  Keaton finally explained her madness when she finished. Madness it was, because healing what she had done to me would cost me a significant amount of my precious juice. “Hancock, we’re going to go hunting together tomorrow. You need to learn how to hunt while both wounded and low on juice.” She laughed. “If you knew how to burn juice, cunt, we wouldn’t have to be so elaborate. Lucky for you, you have a teacher who’s glad to provide despite your failings.”

  ---

  We hit Knoxville and Chattanooga. No juice. You would predict these smaller cities would be far less fruitful to hunt than the major metropolises, but Keaton claimed her hunting data supported a higher relative frequency of transformations in the interior riverfront cities of the United States, compared to the huge coastal metropolises. Memphis equated Baltimore, in her mind, as far as chance of success was concerned.

  When I asked her if I had her permission to, someday, pass her information on to Zielinski, she even agreed. This meant she would eventually allow me to talk to the professional Transform community again. So far, I had been kept close, under Keaton’s eye, unable to talk to any of them.

  On the way out of Chattanooga, we stopped at random cheap diner and watched a heavyset man snarl at a meek wife who sported a black eye under heavy makeup. Keaton narrowed her eyes and I predicted trouble. Twenty minutes later we followed the couple out to their car and staged a robbery. I lifted the cash, added a few bruises to the woman’s collection while I knocked her unconscious, and Keaton, no surprise, made off with the man.

  She took the three of us to a lumberyard, closed for the night, where she tied the man backwards over a stack of two by fours and proceeded to work out her hostilities.

  I wondered sometimes why wife-beaters bothered her so much. Certainly she wasn’t defending the woman, and given her own abusive habits she had no basis to complain of some other abuser’s actions. Maybe she considered them competition.

  She didn’t want my help this time. She hadn’t wanted my help with her toys since I returned from California. After the first couple, I understood that she had forced me to participate earlier only because she wanted to rouse what she considered my predatory instincts. And because I hated it, of course, so she got two victims for the price of one. Now that I had come to enjoy the cruelty, she felt no need to give me the pleasure.

  Instead, she talked as she entertained herself with the man, telling me how I would be her victim tonight except for my current lack of juice. How I should be grateful to her for the work she had done on my knee, because of how my miserable low juice gave me protection.

  Usually, I ignored such minor harassment, but low juice made me vulnerable, and Keaton always knew how to push my buttons. When we finally slept, still at the lumberyard, still inhaling the vapors of death and agony, the p
ain from my knee found echoes in my dreams. I dreamed of my early days in Keaton’s hands, the endless torment, the madness, the terror, and the slow collapse of the self.

  I woke up screaming after only an hour. As an Arm, I only needed a couple of hours of sleep each night, but one hour wasn’t sufficient. I stayed awake anyway, watching the night and the dead body of the wife beater, trying to ignore the ache in my knee. Keaton, fortunately, left me alone and went back to sleep.

  I had sold my soul to the devil. I knew this, I made the deal voluntarily, and I had been granted the pleasures as well as the pains of hell. Yet, I couldn’t help wishing – couldn’t there be more to life than this?

  The next day we hit Memphis. I was groggy with lack of sleep, stupid with low juice, aching and limping with my bad knee, and cranky with general bad attitude. Of course, as in all our joint hunts, Keaton couldn’t resist taking advantage. She would always divide the territory we hunted, such that she got all the prime areas and I got the shit: the suburbs, the industrial districts, the shopping centers and the usual utter crap. I figured I had today and tomorrow to find juice before I became too low on juice to hunt at all, at which point I figured a worse lesson would ensue.

  In any event, three miserable hours into my hunt in Memphis I found something strange. I had been taking a wide swing south of the Memphis airport to get to another not-so-prime hunting area, out in the semi-rural areas south of town. In fact, if the main road I planned to use hadn’t been closed due to construction I would have never spotted the anomaly at all.

  I couldn’t believe my metasense when I spotted it out in the middle of nowhere, so I just stopped and watched for five minutes to verify I wasn’t hallucinating. Low on juice, and on my wobbly knee, hallucinations were a real worry. Eventually, I convinced myself. Then, after a massive application of willpower, I went off to get Keaton. Despite what my juice monkey wanted, no way would I tackle anything this strange on my own. Especially in my current state.