“This had better be good, Hancock, or you’re going to…” Keaton stopped her threat when she got a look at me. I had come into her metasense range and she had immediately pulled off the road and parked in front of some lawyer’s small office. Ever the good student, I came to her, and stood at attention beside her now open driver’s side window. “Out with it. Now!”
It took work to damp my Arm urges to dominate right now and I almost missed. “Ma’am,” I said, and took three deep breaths. Keaton glared, intolerant; she had caught my display, as always able to read my mind with ease. “I found two prey Transforms and nine Monsters south of town. Not moving. Close together.” I didn’t attempt to cover my reactions or my emotions. I wanted Keaton to read the truth in me. The whole idea of clusters of Monsters scared the crap out of me. I also knew how annoyed I would be if someone interrupted my hunt.
“What else did you find out?”
“I didn’t want to approach the place, ma’am, before informing you.”
“Huh.” Keaton studied me, got out of her car, and led me around the corner to the side of the small office, where we weren’t quite so obvious from the street. “I’m going to ask you to think some dangerous thoughts, Hancock. Do a good job.”
“Yes, ma’am.” What was this?
“Think about attacking me.”
I panicked momentarily, this being far too close to my repressed reaction of a moment ago. Keaton crossed her arms and frowned. All right. I let my anger through and thought about attacking her. I suspect it was beyond believable.
She nodded, but did not otherwise react. “Think about what you’ve said to Focuses, today.”
No problem. I had never talked to a Focus in my life.
“Think about your last trip to Pittsburgh.”
I had never been to Pittsburgh. Keaton insisted I stay out of the Pittsburgh area, for no apparent reason. I had obeyed.
Keaton nodded again. “Think about your conversations with the authorities today.”
Ah. Understanding seeped in to my low-on-juice fuzzy mind. She feared someone or something had messed with my head and my discovery was a trap for her. Again, I hadn’t said anything to any authorities today, so this was also easy.
Keaton ran through several more screwy questions, including one about my last conversation with Dr. Zielinski. I hadn’t seen him since St. Louis.
“We’ll take both cars. You lead, but stop when we’re at the edge of our range,” Keaton said. She didn’t explain about the obscure interrogation. She expected me to figure it out on my own. I climbed in my car and led the way.
Keaton was paranoid. Well, so was I after I had examined the place. Shit, fleeing as if the dogs of hell nipped at our heels looked damned appealing. Monsters were, well, dumb Monsters by definition. They didn’t come in packs…at least until right now.
I drove back to the dirt road south of the airport, then stopped my car and got out when I metasensed the Monsters again. Keaton got out of her car, as well. She motioned me forward and we went a couple hundred feet closer, cross-country through elderberry and poison ivy into a dense forest. Then she motioned me to halt and ducked down in the hollow of a small creek.
“What do you make of this?” she asked, whispering.
I metasensed again and shook my head. “I still count nine Monsters, eight who aren’t moving and one who is. Two woman Transforms, no Focus tags. I’d swear now that two of the Monsters have Focus tags.” I kept my voice at a whisper. Keaton nodded at my last comment. “One of the Monsters, the one who’s moving, is above the others. On the second floor of a house, perhaps?”
Keaton shook her head. “I think the other eleven are in a cellar.”
“It’s a trap,” I said. “The two prey haven’t moved an inch. They must be under duress.”
“A trap is a possibility,” Keaton said. “The FBI’s used bound Transforms as bait before. I’ve never seen anything like this, though. Monsters are loners and they’ll fight anything they can reach.”
My anxiety grew. I thought Keaton already knew everything.
“Should we leave, ma’am? Run?” Leave the juice behind? I suffered my juice monkey in silence.
Keaton licked her lips. “Not until we’re sure we can’t take the Transforms.” I nodded and nearly dropped into a stalk. “We need to figure out what’s going on. If either of us blundered into a pack of Monsters at close range, while hunting alone…” Keaton let her whisper trail off. Yes, something like that could easily be a threat. Hell, old organized Monsters might be more than a threat. They could be fatal.
I nodded again. She motioned me to move to the side. I hobbled away from her about ten feet, through the trees and scrub brush. She signaled for me to stop moving away and motioned us forward. We moved slowly and as quietly as my aching knee permitted, then after another signal, we circled to the north. Ah. She wanted us downwind. We had been coming in from the northwest and the wind today was blowing from just west of south.
Fifteen minutes later, she stopped, and motioned me to come over to her. I slipped as silently as I was capable of through the brush. Damn, I felt like hell. My knee hurt, my mind felt like mush, and my juice monkey screeched like some lunatic demon from Bedlam.
“What do you smell?” she asked.
“Forest. Trees, dead leaves, mold. Like that.”
Keaton frowned. “You can’t smell Transforms?”
I shook my head. My sense of smell was good, but not that good.
“Huh.” She motioned us forward again, another couple hundred feet, putting us about a thousand feet away from the house, in a stand of young oaks growing up around the collapsed remains of some fallen giant of the species. She knelt, and motioned me down beside her. She had found a faint footprint of something monstrous in the rich loam.
“Smell that?” she asked, at a whisper.
“In the footprint?”
“What…” She was about to say ‘what footprint?’, but she stopped when she found it.
I stuck my nose in the footprint and sniffed. There was something off about it. After I sniffed for a few moments, I picked out a Transform scent. How in the hell had she caught the scent from absolutely nothing?
“I’d say my sense of smell is significantly better than yours, Hancock…and your eyesight is better than mine,” Keaton said, a quiet whisper.
I nodded. “I swear I’m smelling a male Transform, ma’am.” In my current low juice state, I wanted to run everything by Keaton before acting on it. In this state, I often made mistakes.
“Perhaps. The male version of the Arm has a Monster form. It’s why they’ve been missed by the authorities,” Keaton said. I shivered at Keaton’s revelation. I hadn’t known. “This one has the footprint of a huge dog or wolf. I wonder what the other one’s like?”
“Other one?” Male Arms!
Keaton nodded. “I smell another one. And calm down, Hancock. The other reason the male version of the Arm has been missed by authorities is they’re as stupid as Monsters.”
Oh. “Is there a male version of the Focus, ma’am?” The obvious question.
Keaton rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.
Which meant ‘yes’. “Are these things here?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t metasense anything abnormal and the scent is at least a week old.”
I had no clue how she picked up age on a scent this faint, so I just shrugged.
“Could they be the Monsters we’re sensing?”
Keaton nodded. “I’ve never encountered one personally. However, we should be able to tell by scent when we get closer to the place.” I shivered again. Monster-stupid wouldn’t give us enough of an edge if these male Arms were as large as their prints indicated.
She motioned us to spread out again and I followed her lead as we moved forward. Three hundred feet closer in, through a nearly impenetrable forest, I found another set of tracks along a rough trail. I motioned for her to come over.
Faint claw marks. And, dammit all,
another set of tracks. Footprints. No scent on the footprints, though.
“Lizard,” Keaton said, now whispering in my ear. “A male Arm in lizard form.” I pointed to the footprints. Keaton jumped, knives suddenly filling her hands. Then she knelt down and sniffed the footprints. A moment later, she collected herself again.
“Either those are old footprints, or someone has a nasty trick. Those tracks didn’t even leave the scent of shoes!”
I studied the two sets of tracks. “Ma’am,” I whispered into her ear. “Each set of tracks is equally as old as the other. Days.”
She looked back and forth at the two sets of tracks. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said, quiet.
“Could this trick be something a male Focus might use?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “This fits what little I know about them.” Crap.
She motioned us city slicker Arms forward, nevertheless.
We paralleled the trail, which did lead to the Monsters and Transforms’ lair, an old abandoned farmhouse, nearly fallen in, in a clearing in the forest. By the time we reached the farmhouse I had picked out thousands of tracks, mostly those of our two male Arms. I found several tracks, though, of a naked human foot with claws, neither male nor fully Monster. I guessed the prints were from the Monster walking around in the house. Keaton also pointed out the male Arm prints weren’t the same size and shape.
As Keaton surmised, the Monsters or male Arms were down in some form of cellar. Recently enlarged, I guessed, from a huge pile of dirt by the side of the house. This was an old fashioned rock-lined dirt cellar, not a modern concrete basement. Chains rattled in the cellar. Keaton signaled to me, including a nose point. I relaxed. She thought no male Arms were present.
The free Monster was doing housework, of all things. I wanted to scream at the unfairness; the universe had no right to go and change the way it worked on me. Monsters weren’t intelligent and they did not do housework. I took a deep breath and concentrated on my sense of smell. Bah. I picked up the scent of feces, urine, and both fresh and rotting food. Off brand canned food, as well, but nothing cooked. And dry dog food, one of the name brands. I had no idea what Keaton smelled that convinced her no male Arms were present.
When we reached the clearing, Keaton squatted under an ancient black walnut and thought for a few minutes. Then she motioned me to go forward, put her hand up to her mouth and made a talking signal. She wanted me to go talk to the Monster! I nodded and obeyed, trying to ignore the fact I thought this was crazy with me in my current state. Keaton slid up toward the house herself, with a gun and a knife out, ready to cover me. Ah. I was bait. She expected the Monster to charge me and give her a shot at its back. Or a knife, if she so chose. As long as we didn’t get a cellar-full of Monsters after our asses, there shouldn’t be much danger.
I quietly sauntered up to the doorway and knocked. The doorway itself leaned to the side slightly, and the rectangular door had popped out to hang open. I held a knife in each hand, ready to meet a Monster charge. “Hey there, Monster? Monster? Since when do Monsters do housework?” I called out. “What’s with the dog food?”
Keaton winced, but not an angry wince.
I never got a chance to see the Monster doing the housework. “Help! Anyone, help! Help! I’m under attack!” the Monster said. Then she screamed bloody murder. I heard a crash and tinkle, followed by the sound of someone running on muddy ground. Our talking Monster was smart enough to run away.
Now that just wasn’t fair. It was bad enough we had a Monster doing housework, but a Monster who talked? This had to be rectified, and…
Keaton grabbed me two steps into my chase to run down this dirty rotten cheating Monster. She shook her head and pointed at the Transforms. Right. Miss Monster wasn’t our prey.
Damn, but I wished I had found this place while I wasn’t low on juice.
We went into the house and found the stairway into the cellar. I noted the two male Arms had gouged up the floor spectacularly. The kitchen tile was nearly ripped to shreds. The place was mostly clean, except for the stink. The house reeked of these male Arms, their odor nearly overwhelming the moldy stench of a house with a leaky roof. We found a rotting carcass of a large dog in the kitchen sink, a carcass missing many hunks. Flies buzzed around it. Well, the carcass explained the dog food, unless the male Arms fed the dog food to the cellar dwellers.
Keaton motioned and led the way down into the hot dark cellar, a place so thick with the reek of shit and filth the air itself seemed liquid. The place erupted with a monstrous cacophony. Unfortunately, the Monsters in the cellar didn’t obey Keaton’s orders for quiet. Not even when she went predator at them. In fact, they did the same back. The faint light from the kitchen above illuminated heavy chains and huge locks restraining each Monster, the chains short enough to keep each Monster out of reach of the others. We ignored the screaming and hissing Monsters as best as possible, and since we couldn’t trivially break the chains, we would have to unlock the Transform women.
The term ‘Monster’ wasn’t quite correct, though. Though they metasensed as Monsters, several showed only a few signs of monsterhood to the naked eye. Not a one of these Monsters talked. The Transform women weren’t in good shape, either. They had been severely abused, the mind gone on the one Keaton motioned for me to free. The look Keaton gave me at the same time was an explicit order: we do not take our prey here. I nodded back, despite my urges. I wanted out of this cellar. Badly.
I picked the damned heavy lock on my prey’s shackles, difficult in the nearly non-existent light. This place made my skin crawl and I breathed through my mouth to keep from vomiting. In addition, the howling half-Monsters made me want to go berserk from anger. No, from anger and fear. Someone had found a way to stop a Monster transformation halfway, a hell of a powerful Major Transform trick. I didn’t want to meet those Major Transforms.
Heh. I grabbed the prey and she became mine. I looked over at Keaton, who just shook her head. Yes, I was a long way from being able to give up any prey I captured.
For the first time since Keaton made me realize I was an ‘evil monster’, I felt like I was doing good. I even felt sympathy for my Transform prey: when I drew her juice she would die painlessly, which wouldn’t happen if I left her here. No creature deserved this basement and no human deserved to live and become a part-Monster to serve the insane purposes of their male captors.
These part-Monsters had to die. The world would be a better place if the male Arms died as well, but I couldn’t do anything about them now.
We trudged up the stairs with the two Transform women as fast as possible, leaving the chained Monsters behind. On the way out, Keaton torched the place, the first time I ever saw her do society a favor. She read my mind with ease, though. “Dammit, cunt, we’re not the good guys. We’re the better guys.” Keaton’s entire philosophy reduced to two sentences. I would hear those lines many times. It wasn’t long before I parroted them myself.
“Ma’am.”
“And don’t even think about faith.” Her comment referenced a brutal argument about the nature of Transform Sickness. Keaton believed Transform Sickness and our abilities had nothing to do with God, the Devil, or any form of supernatural. I disagreed. “Propaganda is the lies we tell our enemies, ideology is the lies we tell our friends, while faith is just the lies we tell ourselves,” Keaton said, in a low mutter. Unoriginal but succinct.
“Ma’am.” I couldn’t grovel while carrying my prey, but I did lower my eyes.
“Dammit, Hancock, just go enjoy yourself.” The screams of the dying Monsters in the burning shack followed us to our cars. “We’ll talk about Monster Arms later.” She was no better at covering the disgust she felt in the basement than I, despite her stone face. We kept our distance on the way out, each with our own prey slung over our shoulders. Me, I still had enough control, despite my low juice state, to not inadvertently suck down the juice of the Transform woman as I carried her. Back in my Detention Center captivity
days I hadn’t had anywhere near this level of control. I had improved.
Keaton, too. She didn’t even blink when she left me with my own nice juice-bloated Transform in my arms. Back when she first started to train me, in Philadelphia, she hadn’t been able to. Me? It hurt like hell to see Keaton drive off with the other Transform woman. But she was the boss, I was the student and I did have my own prey to assuage my hunger. Nothing had changed; the pleasure of the draw still so overwhelming it drove away all the agony, torture and general crap that Keaton and life itself put me through.
I suspected Keaton referred to the male Arms when she made her comment about ‘Monster Arms’, but her label was a good name for this place, as well. A quiet rustic chateau in the forest, with affordable rates, continental breakfast, with many vacancies for a whole passel of visiting Transforms…
Enkidu: March 29, 1967
“I told you that both of us out hunting at the same time was a brainless bit of stupidity,” Enkidu said, kicking at the smoldering remains of Grendel’s house. Grendel had howled with loss when he spied the ruins for the first time. Enkidu got angry with those who did the dirty deed.
“If you’d been here this wouldn’t have ever happened!” Cleo said. She had already told them the story of the two attackers, the two Transform women. Based on Gilgamesh’s tales, they had to be the Arms.
“What’s it to you?” Enkidu growled. Cleo had wept when they returned. Typical woman. Now anger. Also typical. “They’re just Monsters.”
Cleo wiped her eyes and stood, challenging Enkidu. Her boss was his boss, and he had to back down.
Or, did he?
He examined the Law in his mind. This was Grendel’s fuck up, wasn’t it?
“Well, so am I,” Cleo said. She wiped the grit off her monstrous face, smearing ash across her scaly cheeks. “Just the same as them. If you…”
“Shut up,” Enkidu said, which he followed with a roar at the talking Monster. Cleo backed away with a growl of her own.
Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) Page 7
