Now We Are Monsters (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  Keaton didn’t tell the truth. The torn clothing, the broken bones and the scabbed over wounds on the Arm told of a recent fight, but the near-Monster effects pointed to something else: the attack of a Crow, something Tonya hoped she would never run into again in her life. Not a subject she would ever breathe a word of. The first Focuses were firm on that.

  “I’m not volunteering any of my people, Stacy,” Tonya said. This was business. “I can arrange clinic Transforms, though. For a price.”

  “You get the Transforms, I’ll pay you a hundred grand a pop.”

  Tommy and Ralph gasped. They didn’t know Tonya did such things.

  “I can arrange for clinics to be unguarded tonight. I can’t physically provide the Transforms.”

  “For that, fifty grand apiece.”

  “Good enough,” Tonya said. “You need anything else?”

  “Have Martha fix me one of her giant meals and I’ll tell you the whole story,” Keaton said.

  Martha, alas, remained upstairs, lost in the juice grope. “How about Betty? Martha’s not available right now.”

  “Do you have to bargain about everything?”

  “It’s been a long day and your appearance here’s upset many of the household Transforms. With good reason,” Tonya said. “Many of them are in hiding.”

  “Fine,” Keaton said. “Betty can at least cook good omelets. I need an insane amount of calories.” She descended into a fit of scratching; writhing on the floor, tiny moans escaped her clenched teeth.

  “I need to make some phone calls,” Tonya said. Keaton nodded, and continued to scratch and moan. Tonya motioned Tommy to come with her and motioned for the non-Transform Ralph to keep track of the Arm. She walked to the nearest phone and started making calls.

  By the third phone call, Tonya located the first usable clinic with a no-hope Transform, a poor unwanted man who would go over into withdrawal in the next thirty-six hours. Not close by. The unknown clinic raiders, likely these Chimeras, had cleaned out all the close clinics.

  “So the mighty Arm lies writhing on the ground, helpless. Surrounded by juice she can’t touch, or she’ll die.” Tonya’s ears picked up the voice, a male voice and couldn’t place it for a moment. One of hers? Yes, her idiot project Transform, Phil. She yanked on his juice, hard, almost hard enough to drop him.

  Tonya put down the phone in mid-conversation with the Maryland Director of Transform Clinics, a Network member, and shouted at Phil. “Stop!”

  Phil, down on his hands and knees next to Keaton, didn’t stop his harassment. “Now you know how it feels to be a worthless Transform instead of a high and mighty Arm,” he said. “Down on the ground, always down on the ground. One step away from death, mind bending Focuses…”

  Enough! She flattened Phil, taking him perhaps a tenth of a point into withdrawal. She didn’t normally use the ultimate juice weapon get Transforms to obey, but Phil, oh Phil, was so hung up on himself he hardly felt the pain of being stripped. “Dammit, Phil, st…”

  Too late. Keaton reached out a hand and started drawing Phil’s juice. Tonya grimaced in pain, as Keaton ripped her Transform away from her. Tonya had written the book on Arms, and the book said the Focus should fight to preserve the life of her Transforms. She knew of five or six ways for a Focus, even a fluff-head Focus, to kill an Arm stupid enough to do something like this in front of her. Tonya’s instincts screamed at her to kill the Arm.

  Not today. Not after being chewed out in her dreams for not cooperating with other Major Transforms.

  Instead, she slapped Keaton with a juice pattern that allowed Tonya to read Keaton’s exact juice count. Using Phil’s clinically living but functionally dead body as a conduit, Tonya fed Keaton juice out of the household juice buffer until Keaton was one point of juice away from going Monster. Then Tonya stopped. Phil relaxed, limp, a smile on his face, quite dead, all of five seconds after Keaton started her draw.

  Keaton passed out in an Arm’s post-kill bliss, doubling as a healing trance. Through her juice pattern, Tonya monitored Keaton’s juice count as it went down. Upstairs, the juice gropers howled a keening death dirge for the not-at-all-beloved Phil.

  Beside her, Tommy vomited. On the other side of Keaton, Ralph aimed his weapon at the Arm, hands still shaking, backing away on wobbly legs. “Should I, ma’am?” he asked Tonya.

  Tonya shook her head no. “That was my fault.”

  “Phil’s fault,” Tommy said, and vomited again. “There’s nothing anyone could have done.”

  “I should have dropped him into withdrawal to start with.”

  “You stripped him, Mom,” Tommy said, rubbing his hands through his curly black hair. “That should have been enough.”

  Tonya shook her head. Yes, she had helped a different variety of Major Transform, but she couldn’t shake a sinking feeling she had started down yet another long dark path. She picked up the phone to continue talking to the politico, but the line was dead. She had pulled the phone out of the wall jack.

  Gilgamesh: September 6, 1967

  Gilgamesh awoke ravenous with hunger, huddled up in an alley, half hidden in a mound of trash. His hunger puzzled him for a second and he realized that, for the first time in weeks, terror didn’t suppress his appetite. The terror left him tired, with a bone numbing exhaustion. He didn’t remember untying his feet from the chair and fleeing the warehouse. He did remember the Skinner’s appearance. He must have passed out in some Philadelphia alley.

  Gilgamesh got up from the hard concrete and walked. He avoided people as best as he could and stayed in the early evening shadows. Limping all the way, he limped back to his apartment, hoping his landlord hadn’t leased it to someone else during his absence. He got lucky and managed to grab his small supply of possessions without attracting attention.

  He couldn’t sleep yet. Not in Philadelphia, even if he couldn’t metasense the Skinner anywhere nearby. He clutched the knife to his chest and moaned. This was the Skinner’s knife, a foot long black steel monstrosity, sharp on both sides at the end and with two sets of serrations near the hilt. On the knife he smelled the Skinner, Grendel and Enkidu…and one other, the reason he treasured the knife. The knife carried Tiamat’s scent. The knife had freed him. The knife was now his most revered possession.

  He remembered so little about his captivity. “Perhaps that’s for the best,” Gilgamesh whispered to himself, as he used the recently purchased carburetor parts to fix his truck’s carburetor. In the dark.

  The landlord caught him there. Livid, he shouted at Gilgamesh about the overdue rent. He even pounded his fist on the truck.

  Gilgamesh felt his heartbeat spike and the terror reactions grip him. However, after the Beast Men and the Skinner, the landlord was small stuff. Gilgamesh silently paid the landlord his overdue rent. After a few more threats, the landlord left him alone.

  In the silent darkness he loaded his possessions into his truck and drove over to Wire’s apartment, where he quietly broke in. He searched until he found every sign Wire had been anything other than a normal human and took the evidence with him. Most importantly, he took Wire’s copies of their Transform Sickness discussion notes.

  He found money there, over a thousand dollars, and a few small gems and pieces of jewelry. He took those, too. Wire needed them no more.

  Tolstoy never had an apartment. He lived, or had lived, in a corner of an abandoned lumberyard. Weather and time had destroyed most of the signs of Tolstoy’s residence, but Gilgamesh found a few of Tolstoy’s papers. He took them.

  Sinclair’s landlord had evicted Sinclair, and he wasn’t happy to see Gilgamesh when Gilgamesh woke him up. However, Gilgamesh had money, and so the landlord took Gilgamesh to the storage room where he stored Sinclair’s things and let Gilgamesh look through them.

  Gilgamesh took the notes again. He also took a few personal items. Sinclair had escaped; Gilgamesh would be able to return those items someday.

  Gilgamesh turned his truck north, driving with the precious kn
ife on his lap, to the one person who might be able to help him, the guru Shadow.

  Tonya Biggioni: September 7, 1967

  “You didn’t kill me,” Keaton said. “You should have.” Keaton sat at the kitchen table, eating a fourth omelet. She looked terrible, but better than her appearance a couple of hours ago. The house stayed quiet. It was after midnight.

  “Your life was worth more to me than Phil’s was. Phil, the Transform you killed, was one of my loaners. He drove his former Focus nuts with his behavior and I was trying to bring him into line. He was being willfully stupid. The idiot wanted to goad me into killing you, proving he was the boss, not me.” Tonya grimaced, and stole a fork-full of omelet from Keaton’s plate. Keaton gave Tonya a ‘please do not play aggravation games with me’ glare, which Tonya answered with a ‘today I own you and don’t you forget it’ glare. Keaton shrugged.

  Keaton’s control was a lot better than it had been, Tonya noticed. Her signals were clear and precise, and contained no more information than she intended. Keaton presented like a top end Focus, and she hadn’t the last time they met in person, eight months ago. Her time spent training Hancock had been good for Keaton.

  Keaton studied Tonya through slitted eyes. “What the fuck happened to you?” she asked. She frowned and backed off for a moment. “I didn’t do that to you, did I?” pointing at Tonya’s right eye.

  Tonya touched the area around her right eye and realized she had picked up a shiner as well as her other wounds. “No. Someone set me up,” Tonya said. “Dropped nine late stage psychos downwind of us, and they charged us through a group of nearly seventy-five protesters. When we killed the psychos the protesters attacked and I had to disperse them with my charisma.”

  “Whoa. I didn’t know Focuses could do that,” Keaton said.

  “Neither did I,” Tonya said, and shivered, reliving the attack for a moment. For a brief instant, she almost got down on her knees and confessed everything to Keaton, uncomfortable with the power she had shown when she dispersed the mob.

  Confessing to Keaton would be a waste of time. Keaton wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable with power and wouldn’t understand the need to commiserate. “We’ve got some new enemies, don’t we?”

  Keaton nodded. “The Chimeras and whatever motherfucker is behind them. Those zombies are their type.” Keaton shook her head. “You should have killed me, Tonya. I’ve been making too many mistakes. I had one of my episodes and I irrevocably messed up my relationship with Hancock.”

  “You gutted her.”

  Keaton nodded. “Left her hanging from a squat rack for three days, too. After she recovered, she would rather die than submit to me.” She paused. “Once she fulfilled her graduation requirement she turned her back on me rather than help in this fight. Can’t say I blame her, either.”

  “The Transform gift was your graduation requirement?” Tonya turned away. Arms! She had to get over her disgust. The Focuses needed functional Arms. Multiple functional Arms. The Focuses had too much dirty work for one Arm to do.

  “Dammit, that’s why I didn’t want you to know my lair was here in Philly! I can’t fucking keep anything secret from you. Yes, giving up her kill was my requirement,” Keaton said. “As I suspected would happen, the Chimeras attacked after I took the kill. We fought. One got away, my second mistake.”

  “Dammit!” Tonya said, angry. Her language always dove into the gutter around Keaton. “She fucking set you up to die, didn’t she?”

  Keaton gaped for just a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that. She was certainly mad enough at me to set up a betrayal.” The Arm leaned back on her chair, causing it to creak ominously. Betty crept in with another plate of omelets, and this time, one for her Focus. “On the other hand, the Chimeras did have quite a few reasons of their own to go after me…”

  “So you found them?” Tonya said, a charismatic demand. She took a bite of her bacon and pepper stuffed omelet. “Why didn’t you ask for payment?”

  “We found them but didn’t kill them. Only one of the two Chimeras was there, and we chased him and his Monster pack away.”

  “Ah. I would have paid you for the information,” Tonya said.

  Keaton shook her head. “It didn’t meet my standard for success.”

  Arms.

  “How devious is Hancock?” Tonya asked. A schemer lay behind today’s mess, Tonya decided. Their new enemy was a conniving mastermind.

  “Deviousness is her specialty,” Keaton said. She unwrapped a bandage Tonya had put on the Arm’s shoulder, over a gaping bite wound, glanced at it – still not closed – and put the bandage back on. “Don’t get any of your twisty Focus crap ideas. I understand Hancock’s mind inside and out; she respects me and wants to deal with me amicably in the future. What I fucked up was her trust of me.”

  “I’ll reserve my judgment on Hancock,” Tonya said. “I don’t like the idea of an Arm running around free.”

  “Hold your goddamned horses. Arms aren’t Focuses. Let her get her legs as an independent until she gets it out of her system, then reel her in. Let her come into her own power. Hell, you remember what I was like in my second year. The best thing we can do is let her find her own way until she matures. She’s going to be impossible to deal with for quite a while.”

  “If she ends up like you were when we first met, then the term ‘maturity’ is a vast overstatement.”

  “Bitch.”

  Tonya still thought Hancock the most likely mastermind behind the recent mess, but she didn’t want to push the argument any further at the moment. So she changed the subject. “What’re you going to do now?” Tonya asked.

  Keaton tried to shrug and stopped with a grimace. “Damn if I know. I liked the world a lot better when it didn’t contain these damned Chimeras. I’m going to investigate them.”

  “That’s going to make it hard on me,” Tonya said. “The Council’s going to…”

  “Fuck the Council. Dammit, Tonya, ignoring reality is just plain stupid.”

  “Not yet,” Tonya said. Tired, fatigued, low on juice and with a frazzled household, she didn’t want to compromise on anything. Especially on the issue of male Major Transforms and the Council. She swore everyone she knew hounded her on the subject. Couldn’t they see she was right?

  “You’re as arrogant as Hank,” Keaton said.

  “Thank you very much,” Tonya said, and nibbled on a cream Danish Betty had brought in with her latest load of food.

  “You’re making the same mistakes as well.” Keaton shook her head. “You’re putting your career ahead of our long term survival. Your own long term survival as well.”

  “I realize that just fine,” Tonya said. “You don’t need to explain my own business to me. I understand the risks. I’ll move when the moment is right. Not a moment before.”

  Keaton shrugged. “Your choice, but if you won’t move now, I’m going to have to cut off contact with you.”

  Tonya’s eyes opened wide and her stomach churned. “You wouldn’t. Not after all we’ve done for each other.” After all the work Tonya had done to build up and support this relationship, after all the political capital she had invested.

  “Really? Interesting viewpoint you have there.” Pause, then with tighter voice: “You’re not leaving me any choice, Tonya. Those Chimeras and their Monster packs are a real enemy, very dangerous. I can’t ignore them if I want to live and I don’t know squat about them. I’ve got a thousand questions that need answering. But if you won’t come around on the subject of the male Major Transforms, I can’t talk to you or get help from you,” Keaton said. The Arm spread a thick layer of marmalade on her toast and ate it in four bites.

  Tonya met Keaton’s eyes. “You must keep in contact.”

  “I will,” Keaton said, responding to Tonya’s charisma. “Just not directly.”

  They stared at each other, Keaton’s blank face firmer and more forceful as each moment passed.

  Finally, Keaton laughed. “Your charisma can’t roll me i
f you don’t believe your own assertions, Tonya. That’s nice to know.”

  Tonya ignored Keaton’s gauche comment and gave up on the direct approach. “Even with the juice I fed you, you’re in bad shape. How many teeth do you have left, anyway? What’s wrong with your left side?”

  Keaton raised an eyebrow, ripped her shirt open, and revealed her right breast. Her breast had burst open and dripped tumors down to her waist. “You’d think something like this would hurt. My legs are what’s really bothering me.” Tonya realized her headache was returning. Keaton’s presence had fouled the dining room, and Tonya couldn’t move juice in the room anymore. Her household would need to move sooner than they had budgeted for. “From an experience Hancock had, I know how to fix this problem. Lots of juice. Flush the system.”

  Tonya watched the Arm fight for physical control over her body, then give in to a long series of lusty scratches. “I’m sorry about everything,” Tonya said.

  Keaton nodded. “None of us have been our best these last many months. The world’s just going to have to make do.”

  When Keaton eventually left on her clinic-raiding trip, she left an extra hundred grand as payment for Phil’s life. Tonya couldn’t complain. Keaton’s Crow-attack remains had polluted a full quarter of Tonya’s house.

  Carol Hancock: September 7, 1967

  Despite the fact I had told Bobby my entire story, save the technical details I wanted to stay secret, he didn’t get really weirded out (his words) until I stopped us for a moment and prayed, after I finished my business at a west Maryland rest stop. Perhaps it was when I thanked Jesus for the time to save myself from Keaton instead of thanking Jesus for delivering me from Keaton, but probably not. More likely, what hit him was when I ended the prayer asking God to give me the strength to preserve Bobby from my wrath when my juice got too low.

  He didn’t know what to do with the concept of an ice cold killer who prayed.