Enkidu checked one last time on the Crows, both feigning sleep. He strode out from beyond the partition, making sure he kept himself between Grendel and the Crows. Today the Crows were tied to a couple of old chairs Enkidu found in a junkyard; he didn’t want the Crows trying anything funny if the Shade guessed right and this was the day. Enkidu wore a trench coat, hiding his immense frame, and a wide-brimmed hat low on his head to hide his muzzle. The fact he maintained a mannish two-legged form, while Grendel was stuck on four legs, meant Grendel always looked up to him. He liked that.
Grendel hissed laughter at Enkidu as he scratched his ridiculous disguise, the skins of all the dogs they killed. Cleo had put the disguise together, saying Grendel might conceivably be mistaken for a large dog. If she believed what she said, she was as addled as Grendel.
“Hrrrr,” Enkidu said. “Your dreams were right, Master. You think the old bitch Arm is going to take the Transform in her lair?”
“If she doesn’t, I want the two of you ready to follow her in the small truck,” Wandering Shade said. “Wherever she goes, you go. When she takes the Transform, kill her. Stay here, though, until the older Arm appears.” Enkidu nodded and hid a grimace. Following the Arms required many stops to wash out their scent, and risked them being caught out in the open by normal humans and the damned Focus bitches. However, with a Transform to kill for their juice, the Arm wouldn’t be going far, and there would be a guaranteed ending at the conclusion of their short hunt.
“What about the student Arm?” Enkidu asked.
“Leave her to me,” Wandering Shade said. “I’ll take the large truck with your Zombie friends to head off any problems with the Focus bitches.”
“Do you mind if we do the extra Crow, Master?” Enkidu asked. “That way, we’ll be fully juiced up and ready to roar!”
“Take them both, if you like,” Wandering Shade said, with a low chuckle. “They’re worthless to me. I’ll leave you to your business and get in position with my truck of treasures.”
Their Master straightened his police officer uniform, put on his policeman hat, then wandered off. With each step he became less and less noticeable to Enkidu’s eyes and metasense, until he vanished completely, leaving behind only the sound of his steps. Enkidu wrinkled his snout, disconcerted as always by his Master’s tricks. At least he was better off than the Crows, who couldn’t see or metasense his Master even when he stood in front of them and spoke.
“Let’s go,” Enkidu said, and led Grendel back into their Crow habitat. “Don’t forget: Gilgamesh is mine. We’re only killing the other one.”
“Hsss.”
Enkidu selected the other Crow, dragged him over to the floor drain, and slit his throat. Gilgamesh screamed as the other Crow died. Enkidu couldn’t make himself care.
Feeding time.
Soon it would be the killing and raping time.
Carol Hancock: September 6, 1967
I pulled the hearse into the warehouse, shut the garage door behind me, and pulled the Transform from the back. Keaton wasn’t home.
The Transform was beautiful and full, a fruit ripe for the picking, but – don’t think. I had planned this out. Don’t think.
I carried him over to the squat rack and laid him on the ground next to it. I got shackles from the workroom and chained him where he lay. I didn’t untie him. He writhed in misery from the too tight bonds, but his misery didn’t matter. He would be dead soon anyway.
His touch was sensuous and soothing.
I looked up from him to the squat rack. The rack loomed above me, practically radiating evil.
Don’t think. Wait. Prepare for my presentation to Keaton.
A car door slammed and the garage door opened only a few minutes later, long before I finished the gourmet meal I prepped.
Crap. Keaton could metasense the prey from a quarter mile away. Hell, if she had been within a quarter mile of any point on the route I took through the city, she would have metasensed him. I had dragged the kill along to the warehouse like a lure.
To my surprise, I relaxed and almost permitted myself a sardonic smile. I no longer worried about my willpower; the kill was no longer mine. I had lost the kill the minute Keaton came in the door, and, amazingly, the loss no longer bothered me. I walked out into the gym to meet her.
Keaton wore a business suit today. She waved at my offering.
“This is your idea of a formal graduation present?” I studied her ice-cold mask of a face. “Something goddamned strange is going on today. All the Focuses and law enforcement officers are on edge. I don’t like my business being interrupted.” She spoke with a soft and controlled voice. Dangerous. Very dangerous.
She must have been stalking the Focus patrols again, a house cat unable to give up on a porcupine hunt, despite the obvious. She had been attempting to unravel the mystery of the patrols for over a week. I had asked her politely why she didn’t call her Network contacts, and she said she had, and gotten nowhere, and said she couldn’t talk to the Focus in charge directly without giving up the location of her lair.
Therefore, her chief Focus contact didn’t know where she laired, but Hank did. Interesting psychology all around on this issue.
“For you, ma’am,” I said, trying for the same level of control. Keaton stayed silent, waiting for more. “Ma’am, if you’re willing, I’m preparing a feast…”
She smiled, slightly. “Not. Today.”
“Ma’am, it’s time for me to grad…” In a breath, Keaton was on me and I flew across the room, the rest of my prepared statement unsaid. I hit the center door of the warehouse with a bang, twisting to hit feet first. I landed ready for a fight, but not initiating one. Or initiating a grovel.
Dammit. I always understood my graduation wouldn’t be as easy as simply filling Keaton’s stated requirement. I was hers and she wouldn’t gladly let me go.
She grabbed me by the neck and pushed her face close to mine as soon as I landed. “Don’t give me this shit, asshole. Our enemies might attack today, and you’re needed.”
She wanted me to knuckle under to her intimidation. I was supposed to crawl and apologize. She wanted me to grovel. If I gave in to her, she would go easy on me. Groveling would be the safe course, the course I had followed for months. A part of me wanted me to follow this path now. She terrified me. She owned me. My bowels turned to water and I wanted to crawl at her feet and beg for leniency.
Groveling was her scenario, though. Her way ended with me giving her the Transform, gratis, and likely stuck with a worse graduation test.
No fucking way. I feared her, but fear had been my constant companion for more than a year. I knew how to deal with fear.
“This kill officially satisfies your graduation requirement, ma’am,” I told her, as formally as possible. I gave nothing away in my voice, which stayed calm and even. “I proved myself, as you yourself demanded.”
She still held me. She shook her head minutely. “I need you here until this Chimera mess is decided.”
A meaningless and indefinite deadline. “You taught me well, ma’am. I learned what I needed, to survive. I can’t stay here forever.”
She cut me off with a knife at my throat. Dammit. Where was her kill lust? A perfectly good kill waited for her, and she ignored the free prey.
Keaton was on the stalk, only her target was me, dammit!
“You meet your graduation requirements only when I say you do! You hear me, bitch?”
“It’s a clean kill.” Screw up her focus. Get her focused on the kill, not on me. “Nobody…”
She twisted her face into a snarl and pressed the knife into my neck.
I had gotten through. Her snarl was an involuntary and honest reaction to her focusing her attention away from the kill.
“This kill is for you,” I offered, placating, soothing. Your favorite drug, dear, just for you!
“Shut the fuck up!”
I shut. I had definitely gotten to her. She wanted the kill. Her temper and her need s
howed through, far more than she liked.
She watched me. Her self-control evaporated, allowing me to read her mind as she considered her options.
Huh. I sensed an idea come to her: chain me up, take the kill, and keep me here to fight whatever fight was coming.
I wouldn’t stand for such treatment. If she tried to chain me, she would start the biggest fight she had ever seen. If she tried to kill me, I would put a bullet through the kill’s brain before I died.
She watched me as I declared my position without words. Almost as if she drew a sheet over herself, she brought herself back under control. She let me go and motioned me over to the sitting area. She sat, and motioned me to sit, not on the floor, but on one of the chairs. A rare privilege.
“Let me state my case,” Keaton said. Ah. Logic time. “Remember the scentless shoeprint?”
Crap. I hadn’t considered that terrifying bit of reality. “Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s a Major Transform trick, a trick I suspect any variety of Major Transform can learn. Hancock, there’s an Arm and a Chimera in Canada who are about a decade old. They possess abilities no other Transforms have. Either might be behind the scentless shoeprint. I once surprised a young man in Indiana who I couldn’t metasense. He wiggled his fingers at me and did something to my metasense, making all the nearby wooden objects metasense as prey Transforms.” She dared me to laugh. I didn’t. It took work. “I also once ran afoul of a Focus in the Pittsburgh area, the reason I told you to stay out of there. For a while, the Focus had me seeing and hearing Hell, like I had been dropped into a fucking movie of the Devil’s playground. She missed covering my sense of smell, though, so I managed to get away. I can’t tell my own Focus where I live because her charisma is too strong and because of her unconscious desires to make a pet out of me, and she’s the closest thing to a friend I have in the Focus community.” Keaton stabbed me with her eyes. “Is this what you’re ready for, Hancock?”
I didn’t want to insult my teacher. She had more than fulfilled her end of the bargain.
“Yes, ma’am.” Now trained, I would risk my life for my freedom.
“I do have more things, juice tricks, that I can teach you,” Keaton said. She showed me her knife and made it vanish. Right before my eyes. Then she made it reappear. Her trick wasn’t sleight of hand. “You still can’t burn.”
I nodded and took a deep breath, ready to match her logic with my own. “I learned a lot from you, ma’am. Probably enough to survive on my own,” I said. “I get on your nerves too often, though. If I stay much longer, you will kill me, a waste of my life and your time, ma’am, the time you spent teaching me.”
“Your one year anniversary present’s a visit with my Focus, who’s also my main Network contact. This Focus saved my life. This Focus holds enough political power to order the Focus Network to be friends with you and support you.” Her predator effect turned persuasive. I felt…tempted.
Damn. Keaton wasn’t supposed to be able to tempt me, especially with some unnamed Focus Network contact. She wasn’t supposed to be able to do this with her predator effect!
I understood the benefits of the damned Network, thanks to Zielinski. This was a hell of a lot better offer than a trick to make a knife disappear. “You’ll need help. I did when I was far more experienced than you are,” Keaton said, still persuasive. “The police and the FBI know far more about Arms and how to hunt them these days. As you well know, there are Transforms who want to kill you. You need what I can teach you!” She paused, and I began to sweat, the merits of her argument wiggling tentacles into my soul. “You’ll be ready to go for real in the first quarter of ’68. You’ll be a far better Arm than you are today, if you do so. I won’t require any additional graduation payments.”
I opened my mouth to give in…and shut it. She had subtly moved from ‘I own you, skag’ to real negotiations. Real temptation. An offer to take my winnings and smile at my victory. Her offer was achingly tempting.
However, if Keaton followed her pattern, I would need to survive at least two more of her major psychotic episodes before I left. Despite her tempting offer, the risk was too high. Worse, she would have to re-establish her Arm dominance over me to continue to teach me. I didn’t want the pain.
My decision was to leave today. I would chance the cold cruel world.
I shook my head and turned down her offer. I filled my mind with gratitude, humbled at her offer, and silently pledged to deal with her amicably in the future. I let her sense my decision.
On the other hand, if she didn’t give me my freedom, I would take it anyway. If succeeding at her graduation test wasn’t enough for her, I would run for it at the first opportunity. I let her sense this as well.
Keaton considered again, trying for a rational decision.
Ha! The kill lying over by the squat rack would keep her from making a rational decision.
As she sat across from me and considered, her eyes drifted out of focus. I had her. Her eyes drifted because she used her metasense on the kill. The kill became hers.
I carefully didn’t react.
Keaton took several long minutes where she tried to reason with her lust. I didn’t move. I barely even breathed.
“Fine,” she said, finally. “I’ll contact you. By telephone. You will not contact me.” Safe. Intelligent. Necessary. “The East Coast, the West Coast and the city of Detroit are mine.” Her permission to claim a new territory somewhere else.
The kill lust had her.
“Ma’am,” I said with a nod, and left. I made sure I passed through the still open garage door before Keaton had any opportunity to change her decision. I kept going for almost exactly a quarter mile. With the kill still alive, at the edge of my range, I stopped.
The recently reinforced garage door rolled down, followed by the clang of the brand new inch thick bolt. A few moments later, the glorious glow of the kill flickered briefly and then went out.
Keaton took him, not in an instant but in about fifteen seconds. Afterwards, she lay down next to the kill in post draw bliss.
I was free! After ten months with Keaton, after a year as an Arm, I was free! I was a slave to nothing and no one. I had what it took to survive. I could hunt. I could recruit normals to my control. I could even control myself. I was free!
I grinned.
Gilgamesh: September 6, 1967
The blindfold was good for something. His three days of involuntary blindness had honed his senses, to where his metasense almost doubled as sight. Over at the Skinner’s warehouse, he metasensed Tiamat’s departure, and the joy in her heart. The Skinner didn’t follow, and though he wasn’t sure how he knew, he believed the Skinner had accepted Tiamat’s gift Transform as payment for her freedom. Tears burned his eyes in relief; Tiamat would survive the Beasts if she kept going. In his heart, he urged her to flee as fast as she could possibly go.
Inside, the Skinner bolted the door and pranced over to the gift Transform. She took him in her arms and tore the juice out of him, not with the incredibly vicious speed of the uniquely fast Arm juice suck, but over fifteen seconds. He died in her arms as she sank to the floor, overcome with post kill ecstasy.
He had never before metasensed the Skinner draw juice, and her relatively slow care surprised him. Of course, the Skinner had been an Arm much longer than Tiamat. He wondered whether she was as useless as Tiamat after a juice feeding.
Gilgamesh feared he had gone insane. He had been bereft of dross, and therefore juice, for over two weeks. Less than a half hour ago Enkidu had killed Tolstoy for his élan, as Enkidu termed it. Gilgamesh hadn’t cried. His tears were long gone. Instead, he took the hot and almost inedible dross left after Enkidu and Grendel scooped up Tolstoy’s élan remains. The two Beasts had forgotten him in their priapic battle frenzy. Another hour and he would have enough dross to properly sick up on them!
Gilgamesh had never hated before. Not like this. He wanted the two Beast Men to suffer for their deeds. If he couldn’t do it, he
hoped the Arms would.
“That’s it, just as our Master predicted,” Enkidu said, metasensing the Arm’s warehouse and the Skinner’s swoon. He bounced on his toes with excitement. “Go! Go!”
The door slammed behind them as they charged the Skinner’s warehouse. Grendel, stuck in his four-legged lizard form, sped ahead of Enkidu. Enkidu, upright, followed more slowly.
They wanted to kill the Skinner and exact their revenge. She lay on the warehouse floor, vulnerable, and the two ‘Hunters’ aimed to surprise her and kill her.
Gilgamesh hoped they would fail. He wanted the Skinner to wake up, see them, and tear their murdering, Crow-killing guts out. She was terrifying and cruel, but she was smart and cunning as well. The Beast Men were little more than beasts, dangerous and deluded. Surely, the Skinner would be able to defeat them.
However, they were predators, too, and there were two of them. The Skinner continued to lie on the warehouse floor.
Grendel reached the Skinner’s warehouse in less than a minute. He didn’t slow his charge when he reached the door, slamming the metal doorway loud enough for Gilgamesh to hear. The door held, to Gilgamesh’s surprise. Grendel tried the other two, but they held also.
The Skinner never moved. Her juice wiggled, though.
Gilgamesh smiled hope and imagined taking dross from the remnants of her kill. It had been so long since he had any Arm dross. Arm kill dross would be wonderful compared to the dross he had been forced to take today. Dross he still took. Gilgamesh felt like he was about to drown in shame.
He would have to free himself, though, to get close enough to take the Arm dross. He wiggled his bonds, but they refused to loosen. Here he would stay.
At the Skinner’s warehouse, Grendel charged the door again, then each of the other doors in turn. Gilgamesh thought it would probably be more effective to concentrate on only one door, but little of Grendel’s mind remained, and he didn’t think to do so.
After Enkidu arrived, he corralled Grendel and convinced him to cooperate as they charged the door together. It took several tries, and each try took fresh convincing. Finally, three minutes after the Skinner killed the gift Transform, they were through.
Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) Page 32
