Keaton tossed something around my neck as I tried to buck my way out of her hold. I pulled myself up, but Keaton wrapped her legs around my legs and down I went. I pulled at the thing around my neck and found hard, thick leather. Keaton kept a steel grip on the thick belt and I couldn’t get it off of me. My vision grayed out from lack of air and lack of blood to my brain. A normal would have been unconscious, but as an Arm I got to lay helpless and conscious for who knows how many minutes, stewing in my own juice.
When Keaton loosened the tie around my neck, I sprang back to life. I found myself immobile, hanging by my wrists from the squat rack. She had chained my ankles to the bottom and a bar in the middle of my back forced my torso forward. I recognized the setup; we had used this arrangement before, on several now-dead victims. Keaton allowed me long enough to realize my situation before she tightened the tie on my neck again. I hadn’t caught my breath from the last time.
I knew what she planned to do to me. I had been through this routine on the other side. She would make me panic. She would give me pain beyond what I could bear. She would rip through my defenses, shatter me, revel in my helplessness…and in the end leave me a broken, mangled wreck. Finally, when nothing remained of my mind, she would kill me.
I couldn’t do a thing to stop her.
My vision grayed out again.
I don’t know how long she played with me. It seemed like forever as she doled out one precious breath at a time, all the while a sadistic gleam in her eyes. One time when my vision came back, I couldn’t see her. She left the tie on my neck, too tight for me to breathe naturally, but not too tight to keep me from scraping in one precious lung-full of air at a time.
I heard the cart, her cart of torture supplies. I had hauled the sorry cart too many times from the weapon room to various points in the warehouse not to know what the damned thing sounded like. I had cleaned the blood off the instruments too many times to not know what came next.
“Please,” I begged, through my rasping gasps for air, when I saw her return. “Please. Anything. I’ll do. Anything.”
She screamed, offended at my words. She upset the cart and did a spin-kick into my ribcage. Ribs cracked. She didn’t stop, and in a never-ending screaming berserk rage she pummeled me until she exhausted herself. No, there wasn’t anyone home. She fought so badly that if I had been free, I would have been able to take her. This psychotic demon was not my teacher.
Exhausted at last, she sat down and admired her work, what she had done to me. She smiled a mad half smile, took out her knife, and slowly, carefully, sliced a hole in the left side of my shirt, where she observed the purpled bruise of the first ribs she cracked. Slice. Into my skin, not deep at all. Nearly without pain.
She stood back and admired her work: the play of the trickle of blood on my skin and the pattern the blood made on my shirt.
Something about the half giggle that escaped her lips got to me. Something about how she carved out a raw picture of me on the inside of her forearm with a miniature scalpel, like a plan or something. Something about the way she held her thumb and fingers out like an ‘L’, movie director style, when she studied me. Something about the way she lovingly put her torture-tool cart upright and loaded it back up. In any event, I panicked.
To her, I had become a piece of art.
I don’t know how long she tortured me. To me, forever. Certainly hours passed, but less than all night, because the dawn did not come. She knew things about pain I hadn’t even conceived of. The torture went on and on and on. I did nothing but panic and endure. And breathe, but even breathing was difficult.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
She carved away the fingernails of both hands and drove her knife into the raw flesh beneath. She carved away much of my flesh with the little knife of hers. Much of the rest she burned. She worked slow and cruel. Several times, she paused in her madness, to let me think I had hope. That I just might possibly survive. Then she crushed my hope with some new inventive cruelty. The juice slowly dribbled out of me as I worked to keep myself alive. That, too, was part of the torture.
All she left me with was the will to live. No juice. No way to fight the pain. No way to quell the fear. As an Arm, I couldn’t even pass out or retreat into shock.
On the knife-edge of death, my world became pain.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
At some point in my struggles, the pain stopped. I forced my eyes open. Nothing. I concentrated my hearing. Nothing. I flickered my metasense on and off. Nothing. The damned demon was gone.
In the entire time since I ran, she hadn’t said a word.
I still hung from the rack. The tie still clinched tight around my neck. Each breath I took still hurt.
I summoned up the energy to pull on my right wrist. The shackle held tight. The little effort sent waves of pain washing through me, and pulled me back to the abyss. A long time passed before I came out of it.
The demon was still gone.
I needed juice. The need burned inside.
I was hungry and thirsty. Voices gibbered in my head.
The world still reverberated with pain. The weight of my body on my wrists and arms and shoulders made each gasp of air a spear of fire through my torso. My muscles screamed in misery. My lungs wouldn’t fully fill anymore. My abdomen felt dipped in flame. My hands and feet were agony. My clothes were gone or charred to my skin, and filth and gore covered me. I heard the steady drip, drip of blood dropping to the warehouse floor. My blood.
I couldn’t get down. I couldn’t even move. Simple breathing took all my energy and will.
I watched the line in the warehouse where the roof joined the wall, the wall that contained the doors. I couldn’t move my head, so I had nothing else to see. I wanted to relax my neck and let my head fall, but if I did, it fell backwards and I couldn’t breathe. I held my head up and watched the ceiling. It hurt to hold my head up so long.
I had no choice.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
Slowly, the line of light crossed the warehouse and dimmed. A full day. At the end, I lived but I still dripped blood. Not good. As an Arm, I should be able to heal from anything. Some juice remained, but my lack of juice tormented me, far beyond my other pains. I felt every second of the day pass. During the day, I learned to ignore pain the hard way.
Only after the sun set did I finally succumb.
I walked on clouds. Ahead of me, a huge wall rose high, into the haze above. A road made of what appeared to be gold brick led to an opening in the wall. The gates across the opening shimmered, almost as if made of pearl.
Oh. I was dead.
I looked around for the expected crowd of people, but found nobody, except for a man sitting behind a desk. He was a tall, burly man, wearing white robes and a halo. I found myself standing on the other side of the desk and didn’t notice crossing the distance in between. “Name?” he asked.
“Carol Hancock.”
“Hmm,” he said as he paged through an immense book open on the desk in front of him. After a moment, he found the page with my name at the top. He quickly skimmed the page, and then shook his head sadly. “Sorry. You aren’t approved.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say, taken aback by the swift judgment. “That’s it? Just a couple of seconds and I’m not approved?”
The man shrugged. “You had your whole life to influence the decision.”
“Well, pardon me for dying. So what happens now?”
He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head over to the side, to where the clouds ended. I followed his gaze to see flames far below. The occasional scream wafted up.
“I’m not really dead, you know,” I said. “I’m hallucinating this.”
“Well, that’s good to know. I’d hate to think anything this cliché was real.” His tone was sardonic. Somehow, I never imagined St. Peter as sardonic. “Since this is a hallucination, you can relax. No reason to worry about your soul at all.”
Hell. I ran my finge
rs through my hair.
“What am I supposed to do about my soul?” I asked, frustrated. “I’m an Arm. I’m evil.” He shrugged.
I threw my hands in the air. “You tell me. You’re the saint. I didn’t turn myself into an Arm, He did. Why would He do something like this?”
“You expect a simple fisherman to explain why He does what He does?”
“Well, He turned me into a predator. How am I supposed to get into Heaven after being turned into a predator?”
St. Peter came out from behind the desk and leaned back with his hip against it and his arms crossed. “You’re certainly not the only predator He’s ever made. Besides, the judgment isn’t ever about what He made you, it’s about what you do with what you’ve been given.”
I sighed and studied the clouds below my feet. They looked like white cotton candy, and my feet didn’t touch them. Being tortured didn’t seem to do much for my imagination. “I haven’t done much with what He made me,” I admitted.
“Doesn’t appear to be so, no,” he said. He talked with a Yankee accent. “Hmm. Third rate thug, self-centered vindictiveness, sadism and murder for its own sake. Not an impressive performance, predator.”
“But I’m evil! I’m supposed to act like that.”
He looked at me and didn’t speak.
“All right, what am I supposed to act like?” I asked. “I tried to act like a decent human being and it turned into a complete disaster. I’m different than I used to be. The old rules don’t work for me anymore.”
Still no answer.
I paced. “So okay, if the old rules don’t work for me anymore, does that mean evil is just as inappropriate as good? Classic good and evil are all human definitions, aren’t they? If I can’t be good from a normal human standpoint, perhaps I shouldn’t assume evil is my only alternative.”
“Hmm?”
“So what is my alternative? The only rules I understand are the old human rules, and I already know those don’t work. What are the new rules? I’m willing to live the way I’m supposed to, if I can figure out what the rules are.”
St. Peter didn’t answer.
I stalked back and forth across the gold brick. “Where do I not fit standard human evil?” I stopped and spread my arms wide, questioningly. “I thought at first that I couldn’t care for people any more. Am I right? Sometimes I don’t care, but sometimes I think I care for Ed and Bobby. However, why do I care for places now, too? Is that evil? When the people of Newark rioted this summer, it hurt as much as when I lost my Grandmother three years ago.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have any idea what I am. Keaton certainly doesn’t. She’s evil and likes it, but she’s in a trap. She’s wrong. ‘Predator’ is far too limiting. It’s like saying ‘humans are omnivores’ and letting the word ‘omnivore’ define humanity. I need to understand what I’ve become. Is that what you’ve been waiting for me to say?”
“It means you’re evil,” Dr. Manigault said from behind me. I was in chains, in the Detention Center suicide room. “You’re nothing but an abomination. Everything you deservedly suffer through, you did or will do to others. When you die, you’ll go to Hell and suffer for all eternity. There is no redemption for your kind. Never ever ever. You’re evil, evil, evil.”
“You’re not evil,” Special Agent McIntyre said. I found myself tied to the bullet-riddled concrete post in the Detention Center courtyard. “You’re an animal. Animals can’t be evil. You’re no more human than my pet dog. You’re a disposable commodity.”
“Come on in here, little heifer,” Uncle Herbie said, and I smelled the slaughterhouse reek. “Come on in…”
“Let’s go hunt Monsters and save the world!” Special Agent Bates and Dr. Zielinski said, chirping like birds. They came to me up here in the white cotton clouds, skipping like schoolgirls. They took me by the hand, but we all stumbled when we got to the edge of the clouds.
Down we all fell into the far abyss.
Part 3
By the Light of a False Dawn
“To straighten the crooked
you must first do a harder thing -
straighten yourself.
You are the only master. Who else?
Subdue yourself,
and discover your master.”
– The Buddha
Chapter 9
Arms have enhanced eyesight, enhanced reactions, enhanced hearing, enhanced smell, enhanced touch, enhanced muscles, enhanced balance, enhanced taste, immunity to intoxicants and poisons, enhanced healing, and many other things too obscure to even contemplate. Still, a bullet through the brain will kill them just as dead as it will kill you. None of the Arm capabilities violates a single law of physics or chemistry, despite what the Bible-thumping preachers and the Arm-loving fans say.
“The Book of Arms”
Gilgamesh: July 23, 1967
A half mile from the warehouse, Gilgamesh and the other Crows prepared as Tiamat began to die. She had been gutted and immobile for nearly forty-eight hours. The late afternoon summer sun beat down on them as they stood at the bus stop on Bartram. The bus wouldn’t show for another half hour, according to the listed schedule.
“I’m ready,” Wire said. Wire crept toward the warehouse, shivering all the while. The other Crows followed with murmurs of encouragement. Gilgamesh concentrated on the back of Wire’s head, scared.
Wire planned to go in to help Tiamat. The rest of them followed as best as possible. The older Crow continued forward, not looking at them, terrified for the first time Gilgamesh had ever seen. His already pale complexion had become white as a sheet.
Tiamat might be close to death but she was still Tiamat, the goddess of destruction.
Wire crept forward to the intersection of Bartram and Holstein and turned on Holstein. A quarter mile from the warehouse, Gilgamesh’s nerves failed and he stopped following, the first to do so.
Sinclair stopped ten paces farther in, unable to take his eyes off the now stationary Gilgamesh.
A hundred yards further on Ezekiel’s nerve failed. He turned and ran.
Three hundred yards from the warehouse, Tolstoy stopped.
Wire sicked up some of his dross when he realized Tolstoy no longer followed. Despite his distress, he continued to creep forward, his teeth gritted and his fist clenched. Gilgamesh kept expecting him to stop, but he never did. Step after step. He sicked up dross twice more but managed to get all the way to the warehouse door.
Inside the warehouse, Tiamat hung, struggling for air, leaking dross like a dripping faucet. Dying.
Wire struggled to breathe and closed his eyes to meditate, unable to move forward. Fifteen minutes later, Wire opened his eyes and reached for the door, which Skinner had closed so hard on her way out it bounced. He touched the handle to raise it the few necessary inches and took a step back in horror, as if electrically shocked. One step became two, then a dozen, then a run. Sinclair and Tolstoy bolted when Wire ran and rushed back, past Gilgamesh.
Tiamat still hung, dying. Gilgamesh took a deep breath and stood his ground.
Wire stopped when he got to where Gilgamesh still stood, frozen.
“Gilgamesh?” Wire said, his voice hoarse and rough. “Snap out of it, kid. Let’s go.”
“We can’t leave her,” Gilgamesh said, his whisper almost inaudible to him.
“I’m sorry.” Wire looked down, ashamed, even after he had gone so much farther than any of them. Tears streaked down his still pale face. “I can’t do it.”
Gilgamesh clenched his hands into fists. “We’re feeding each other’s panic. Look at us! We can get right up next to the door of the warehouse most of the time. Surely we can find a way to get there now.”
The expression of tight panic on Wire’s face faded. A couple blocks away, Gilgamesh sensed both Sinclair and Tolstoy stop running. Ezekiel hadn’t stopped.
“You think so?” Wire said. “How?”
Gilgamesh nodded, short and sharp. “My panic faded when I stopped moving forward.
It wasn’t my panic I experienced; it was yours and everyone’s. Some kind of giant feedback loop based on our ability to pick up emotions through our metasense. As soon as I stepped out of the loop, the panic went away.”
Wire stared off into the distance and his breathing gradually returned to normal. “We did it to ourselves.”
Gilgamesh nodded. “We’ve got to do something. If we understand the problem, that should help.”
Wire turned back to Gilgamesh; Wire’s exhausted eyes told him the high cost of Wire’s attempt.
“I guess it’s my turn to try, isn’t it?” Gilgamesh said, his voice tight and high.
“I guess we’ll get to find out how crazy you really are,” Wire said. ‘Crazy’ meant ‘brave’.
Gilgamesh nodded. His faded panic returned, his heart beating hard enough to make his throat throb, just at the thought of ‘his turn now’. “Can you help? I don’t know, just…don’t panic me. Support or something. Something calm. Hell, talk about the Phillies, for gosh sakes.”
Wire spat. “Talking about the Phillies is not calming.”
Well, that was the truth.
“Give it a shot, young Crow hero,” Wire said. He nodded formally to Gilgamesh and walked back to the others.
So, what did his Crow friends decide to talk about? Tall tales about Hera’s exploits, of all things. Their stories might calm them, but Gilgamesh had to repress the urge to go back and chew them out. Talking about Focuses did not calm Gilgamesh down.
Of course, if he chewed them out he would panic even more, and…
The best thing to do was to get far enough away so he couldn’t hear them yakking. Hera had been on the local TV news three days ago, going on about some Monster conversion in a high school in Fort Lauderdale, and the massacre that followed. They might consider the subject calming, but Gilgamesh didn’t.
Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) Page 21
