Now We Are Monsters (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  “To me,” Tonya said to her people, and strode forward. Toward the protesters. She batted away a thrown perfume bottle and didn’t break stride. Visions of blood and slaughter filled her mind.

  Her guards went with her.

  A wolf’s howl echoed from the warehouse district to the north, freezing everyone but her. “Come on!” she urged her people. They didn’t move. A juice effect!

  The juice trick didn’t last long. Both her people and the protesters surged forward. Tonya moved as well, not as confident as before the howl. Butterflies filled her stomach. More went on here than her confrontation.

  Gilgamesh: September 6, 1967

  Gilgamesh couldn’t turn his metasense away from the fight, much as he wanted to. Shock filled him. He knew the predators were dangerous, all three of them, but the brutal viciousness of the fight overwhelmed him. All of them possessed strength and speed he would never obtain.

  Still, Gilgamesh grinned a snarl of his own at Grendel’s fall. The murderous bastard who killed Wire was dead, even though it appeared he gave himself up to the Skinner in the instant before she killed him. That wasn’t enough to redeem him, Gilgamesh decided.

  The Skinner paid a price for eliminating Grendel, because it gave Enkidu a chance to catch up with her. Enkidu fanged open her right leg at the thigh before she leapt away, and ripped a gaping wound from her hip to her knee.

  She should have fallen. She had lost the use of both her right arm and right leg, and she had multiple other wounds, the worst being the gouge in her side. She shouldn’t have been able to walk at all. She still stood, and she still moved, hobbling now, with none of her lightning speed.

  The Skinner and Enkidu faced each other across Grendel’s fallen body, fifteen feet apart. Enkidu remained uninjured.

  Gilgamesh still wasn’t sure who would win, despite the Skinner’s wounds. Enkidu had underestimated the Skinner. He still did, if Gilgamesh read the Beast’s posture. Enkidu’s tension dissipated, replaced by a lip-licking smirk. Larger, stronger and unwounded, Enkidu thought he had already won.

  The Skinner did something that astonished Gilgamesh. She leaned backwards, with a sort of mocking ease and stood there, just tossing her knife into the air and catching it again. Mocking. Arrogant. Contemptuous.

  Enkidu lost it. He roared and charged. The Skinner’s hand blurred with motion as she pulled another knife from behind her back and threw it. The knife landed in the center of Enkidu’s chest. The Arm didn’t meet his charge; instead, she caught her first knife on its descent and hopped.

  Gilgamesh had thought she would be crippled and nearly immobile with her injured leg. Instead, with only one leg, she still maneuvered faster and with more agility than any normal human.

  She put her knife back into its sheath as she flew through the air and used her one functional hand to grab a rope. As Enkidu leapt into the air after her, she swung and let go, passing inches behind his back. She unsheathed her knife again, cut him deep and low in his back as she flew by, then grabbed his foot and held. Her weight altered his trajectory and he missed the rope. He kicked and she let go, flying through the air to land heavily on the ground. Enkidu, larger, landed much more heavily, and quite awkwardly, driving the first thrown knife deep into his massive chest. The Skinner hopped in and cut him again, slicing deep into his lower left leg before he recovered, leaving him as injured as the Skinner, if not worse.

  The Skinner was no more injured than she had been before. In a flash of insight, Gilgamesh saw Enkidu’s big mistake.

  His Beast Men captors figured that since they were larger and stronger than any Arm, their size and strength would be enough to compensate for an Arm’s more efficient muscles. The two of them, against an unconscious Arm, should have been able to win.

  However, Enkidu had been a Major Transform for only six months. The Skinner had been a Major Transform for four years. Bigger and stronger meant little. The Skinner’s four years of juice-powered development, as well as her four years of devious tricks and experience with her Arm capabilities, was an immense advantage.

  The two Beast Men would have taken Tiamat, an Arm with similar experience as a Transform. The Skinner was something else, and Enkidu was playing out of his league trying to take her by himself.

  The Skinner attacked Enkidu again, darting in and out, staying out of his reach, cutting him thrice more and emptying some firearm at him. To Gilgamesh’s surprise, the firearm slowed Enkidu less than the Skinner’s knives had.

  After Grendel’s fall, Enkidu hadn’t touched the Skinner.

  Enkidu then proved he wasn’t stupid. After the hail of bullets, as the Skinner changed clips, Enkidu ran.

  Chapter 14

  Never forget that Arms are dangerous. If an Arm wants you to submit, submit. If the Arm wants you to dance, dance. If the Arm wants to screw you silly, allow her. If the Arm wants to kill you – well, I hope you have made peace with your God.

  “The Book of Arms”

  Tonya Biggioni: September 6, 1967

  “Stop the fighting. Go home. We’re all safe now. We killed them in self-defense,” Tonya said, leaning on her charisma. She kept her charismatic command simple and stupid, ignoring logic. A few more of the protesters fled. Her guards held their fire. She approached close enough to the first rank of protesters to smell their last meals.

  She repeated the message. More charisma. The protesters were too close to throw rocks and bottles, and Tonya’s charisma prevented any protesters close enough to take a swing from doing so. Perhaps one in ten of them naturally resisted her charisma, but they were a mob now. The ones who resisted followed those who dispersed. A second wolf howl sounded to the north, stopping the protesters for a moment, before goading the fleeing protesters into a panicked run.

  The howl didn’t stop her.

  She repeated her message again as sirens began to echo in the distance. A few of the protesters who resisted now got close enough to take a swing. She stuck her index finger in the face of one who approached too close and Tommy pushed him away. Caught up in the mob mind, he fled. The protesters screamed and yelled at her, but they didn’t drown out her voice or her charisma. Again, Tonya made eye contact and gave the orders. Again.

  Tonya’s body hurt, hurt badly. Not from the attacks but because she had exhausted her juice. All Focuses had low juice, for reasons Tonya did not understand. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, and she didn’t possess the necessary talents to use the juice held in her household juice buffer.

  She did everything the hard way. As always.

  “Stop the fighting. Go home. We’re all safe now,” Tonya said. As the lead protesters dispersed, others stepped forward to confront Tonya and her household. Her body ached with fatigue and low juice.

  Her mind spun back to a memory from a year and a half ago at a Northeast Region Meeting, a confrontation with Lori. ‘What have you turned me into by forcing me to hunt Monsters with my people?’ Lori had said, the first time Lori had ever been able to stop her charisma cold. ‘I’ve become as much a Monster as those I hunt.’ Tonya empathized with Lori’s plight, then and now.

  Tonya repeated the message to the protesters and enforced it with her charisma. Met eyes, made the connection. If not for Tonya’s own Monster hunting days, her will wouldn’t be strong enough to disperse a crowd. No Focus had ever done anything like this before. “Stop the fighting! Go home!” People fled her. No human should be able to do this.

  How inhuman had she become?

  How much of a Monster was she?

  “Stop, stop,” Pete said. “They’re all gone.” He held Tonya upright, her legs wobbly underneath her.

  Tonya existed now in some sort of half-trance of extreme juice use, brought on by the use of her charisma while her personal juice count approached withdrawal.

  She had done it.

  She had stopped a slaughter.

  She was so low on juice that she could barely see. She couldn’t metasense. Her body shook with effort and pain. She
scanned around and found nothing to do. No enemies. The psychos were dead, the threatening protesters scattered, and there had been no third wolf howl.

  Tonya’s legs failed her completely and she fell into a half-unconscious swoon.

  Carol Hancock: September 6, 1967

  Officer Cannon led me to the back seat of his police car. Something was wrong with this back seat. The smell was off and I didn’t feel like I sat on a car seat. I probed Officer Canon again with my metasense, but this time I didn’t break free of her control. I pressed harder and snarled. In the distance, I swore I heard a wolf howl.

  “Don’t bother with the wild wolf routine, Hancock,” Officer Canon said, echoing my thoughts. She spoke with an angry growl, deep and loud, a man’s voice, but the change didn’t matter much to me, since Keaton regularly used the same trick. I still couldn’t pick up a single thing off of my metasense. It chilled me that she knew my name. “We’re all predators, all of us Major Transforms. Most haven’t realized it, yet.”

  Idiot. Liar. “Go fuck yourself. I’m not working for you, no matter what you’re offering.”

  “How about if I offered you Keaton’s head on a platter?”

  “You don’t have it and you won’t get it,” I said. Megalomania. Did this idiot think I graduated just to plan my revenge on her? Keaton saved my miserable life. I wanted her as a peer. I no more wanted her to be a corpse than I wanted her to be my slave master.

  My captor’s comment gave me insight into the way she thought. Officer Canon wasn’t only evil by choice, but one of those people consumed with hatred and her own self-importance. If Officer Canon escaped someone who owned her in the same way Keaton recently owned me, she would have put her entire effort into killing him or her.

  “You’d be surprised. I need an Arm,” Officer Canon said, back to the subject of employment. “I’ll destroy you if I have to, but I would rather recruit you.”

  I refused to let either happen. I still had the flensing knife in a sheath along the inside of my left arm, and I knew how to use it. This damned evil Focus was through messing with my mind!

  I grabbed the flensing knife with my right hand and plunged it deep into the index finger of my left hand, scraping bone. The pain, real and horrific, brought spots to my eyes.

  I let the pain feed my concentration, and I concentrated on my metasense.

  The world around me vanished. No back seat, no police car. I found myself in some sort of truck, the rear door still open, assaulted by the stench of Monsters and bad juice. To my metasense, Officer Cannon became indistinct, not quite there, some sort of large fog bank. I hadn’t penetrated all of her illusions.

  She was fiddling with a lock, attempting to put a heavy chain and shackle around my right ankle. Close. I yanked free of the shackle and kicked at her. Hit. Hard. She flew back across the truck, but as she did so, she waved her right hand at me. I skidded back as fast as my feet could scramble, but the edge of something unseen hit me as Officer Cannon thudded into the front wall of the truck with the meaty crack of at least one bone breaking. Cannon’s attack sickened me, as if she had turned me inside out and dropped a full load of Monster juice into my body. I puked and my metasense failed.

  I puked again and backpedaled as fast as possible, given the circumstances. I only half-stumbled once, and when I reached the back of the truck, I drew my .45 and looked for Cannon. Nothing. Sirens blared in the distance. A passerby took one look at my bleeding hand and screamed.

  Damn. Too public.

  “No! I mean you no harm. I just want to…” Officer Canon said. She took a couple of steps forward, visible again, but stopped when her eyes found my pistol.

  I doubted she was where she appeared to be.

  I leapt back, out of the truck. Canon took a step forward. I took another step back. Canon smiled.

  I marked Canon as a Focus; her abilities matched Keaton and Zielinski’s commentary about the tricks of the top Focuses. My head spun from her mind games. Still, my gut feeling was that if I stayed far enough away from her, Canon couldn’t harm me.

  “I’m not interested in what you have to say. Go away,” I said.

  Officer Canon vanished from my sight, complete with the Cheshire Cat smile-vanishes-last routine, the arrogant bitch. I hadn’t taken my eyes off of her. The passersby screamed again. Hell! They too saw Officer Canon vanish.

  No one could vanish from sight in broad daylight!

  I’ll admit, I was backsliding badly toward a belief in the supernatural. Keaton and Zielinski had convinced me everything about Transforms was purely natural, but Officer Canon’s actions provided a strong refutation. I took another two steps back.

  “You’re dead, Hancock, you unreasonable bitch! You’re as dead as Keaton. As dead as any Arm. A plague on all Arms!” Officer Canon said, from somewhere invisible and close. Several passersby heard Canon’s curse and started running. I was in deep trouble. Real deep trouble. Any moment now, Officer Canon would pluck out a firearm and shoot me from her invisibility, or hit me dead on with her make-you-puke weapon.

  Oh.

  Shiiit.

  Officer Canon was the evil clown from my nightmares, following me from behind mask after mask after…

  I panicked in utter terror, deeper than Keaton’s worst.

  Instinctively, I focused my metasense on where Officer Canon had to be, at the back edge of her truck. Lo and behold, I metasensed her as an indistinct presence, a monstrous fogbank three times human size.

  Flushed, my skin all warm, my eyes opened wide with shock. I had burned juice! Driven by panic, I had burned juice into my metasense.

  I had to control it. Otherwise, I would burn myself out, just as Fouke did.

  Another wolf howled in the distance. This time the howl raised hackles on the back of my neck. There was juice in that howl! A Chimera!

  I backpedaled as fast as possible, burning juice, firing in Officer Canon’s general direction to distract her. I didn’t care whether I hit her or not. It was time to run. I didn’t want her to get close to me again. I certainly didn’t want to fight a Chimera and Officer Canon at the same time.

  Luckily, whatever was wrong with Officer Canon’s sanity affected her grasp of combat tactics. Even I wouldn’t have made as many mistakes as Officer Canon, given all her advantages. I pegged her as some sort of ancient powerful Focus, and someone with her experience should have about a dozen ways to kill or disable me, especially if she combined firearms with the invisibility trick. I refused to give her enough time to figure out how to fight.

  I ran.

  I managed to shut off the juice burning trick a half mile into my run, but I didn’t stop running until I nicked a car on the other side of Philly almost two hours later. I swear I must have skipped in joy a quarter of the way to that car. I was free! Out of Keaton’s darkness and into the light! I had escaped from Officer Canon, proving myself ready to face the world on my own!

  I had also figured out how to burn juice.

  Heh.

  Gilgamesh: September 6, 1967

  “Dammit!” Gilgamesh said, a mumble through his gag. He tried again to walk his chair across the floor, and again got nowhere. Still blindfolded, he couldn’t see what impeded him, even with the ocean of foul dross outlining everything with vivid metasense light.

  Enkidu strode back toward the warehouse, defeated, but very much still alive.

  Gilgamesh panicked at the thought of Enkidu’s return, his stomach threatening to come up on him. The stench of Tolstoy’s corpse in the close hot warehouse didn’t help. Even Grendel hadn’t died, despite his massive wounds.

  The Skinner took a few precious moments to deal with Grendel. First, she tried to take juice from him. She gave up on that after a few seconds. After she hopped around her warehouse for a few more seconds, steaming in anger, she returned to Grendel and beheaded him, presumably with a larger knife or sword. Beheading seemed to do the trick, although to Gilgamesh’s disgust quite a bit of tenacious life remained in the Beast Man.
His life force faded, though. He wouldn’t recover on his own. After the beheading, the Skinner picked up some more heavy weaponry and left her lair to follow Enkidu.

  Enkidu had enough of a lead to safely kill or kidnap Gilgamesh long before the Skinner arrived.

  Wounds slowed both of the predators, and neither moved faster than a normal walk. Enkidu carried more wounds and much worse wounds, but there was so much more of him to wound. Both of them acted jumpy, likely due to the police action just to the south near where the Focus had been attacked by the male Transforms in withdrawal. With Enkidu’s greater metasense range, he probably also worried about whatever Tiamat had encountered. She ran, now, after fighting an indistinct Major Transform Gilgamesh couldn’t even identify as to type.

  Enkidu would arrive here in a minute, unless the Skinner finished Enkidu off with her new weapons. She took several long-range shots at him, but he didn’t fall. One police car siren approached, but the car rolled in slowly using an ultra-cautious Monster-hunting technique. Gilgamesh suspected the male withdrawal victims, the exhausted Focus and Enkidu’s wolf howls had the police spooked.

  Gilgamesh took a deep breath and calmed himself as best he could. He carried enough dross now for a good sick-up, which he hoped would work. Unfortunately, sick ups hadn’t worked on Enkidu, before.

  Enkidu, however, proved to have other ideas. When he reached the warehouse, he stepped in only long enough to grab a large pack before heading off, about three seconds worth of work. A costly three seconds, as the Skinner shot at him again with her high-powered rifle as he exited the warehouse. This time she hit Enkidu in the back.