All Beasts Together (The Commander) (4 page)

Memories from a few minutes earlier came surfacing, th
e hazy time immediately post kill when reason fled and I lost myself in the grip of sensation and desire.  I remembered the Chimera, dressed in a heavy concealing cloak, coming into the apartment.  I remembered the Chimera speaking.  “She was just about to go Monster and you took her,” he said.  “She was
mine!
  You did it again, you fucking Arm!”  And: “I’ll get juice out of you one way or another, you Lawless Beast.”

I finally came to enough to put everything together.  Yes, back during my apprenticeship with Keaton, we had found and killed the harem of this prick and his buddy outside of Memphis, in a place we called Monster Arms.  Later, these same two Chimeras found us in Philadelphia.  We fought one of them, Mr. Lizard, but he and his new harem got away.  Later, on my graduation day, these two fiends jumped Keaton in her lair.  I hadn’t gotten the whole story from her – fancy that – but I d
id know Mr. Lizard had gone to the great Monster harem in the sky and his werewolf buddy rapist escaped, severely wounded.

Finally, the shock congealed and my mind and
my will came roaring back.

What the hell was I doing?

This motherfucking Chimera was taking me apart the long way and I lay here on the floor
asking for it
.  What the fuck had I been thinking?  Except, well, there hadn’t been any thinking involved, or I wouldn’t just be lying here.  I knew something about snuff sex but I was on the wrong end!

Fuck.  I was pinned, both by his weight and by
his damned oversized penis stuck up somewhere in intestine-land.  Yes, I could go for minutes without breathing, perhaps a half hour or more if my juice held out so I didn’t die from lactic acidosis.  He had ripped through at least one of my jugulars, but I had already healed them closed. Arms are tough.  Worse, the glaze in the damned Chimera’s eyes looked fucking familiar.  Something was wrong with his juice, but I couldn’t quite tell what.

Oh.  That was
my
juice inside this male version of an Arm.

Now that wasn
’t fair!

Quickly, burning even more juice as I did so, I reached for the gun at my waist. 
No gun. Dimly, I remembered the Chimera taking away my pistol and throwing it across the room.  I burned hotter and reached farther down for the knife I wore on my thigh.  Shreds of my skirt covered the sheath, and the knife remained, albeit blood-slippery. I tore through the fabric to my knife and pulled it loose.  I stabbed him right under the navel and pulled up as he thrust yet again, my teeth clenched in fury as he buried his fangs in my right shoulder.

The Chimera bucked, roared and pulled away.  I backhanded his left arm with my knife with all the leverage I had available and, impossibly lucky, severed
clean through the joint in his wrist.  His hand remained attached by a few threads of flesh, and those parted as he threw his arm wide for balance.  The hand bounced off the wall to land on the floor behind me.

I followed him as he scrabbled away and plunged my knife back into his midsection, through his stomach and towards his heart. 
Die, damn it!
  I needed a longer knife.  Six inches wouldn’t, um, cut it in this situation.  I needed to do far more damage than this.

The Chimera’s blood poured over me to join the red of my own blood.  He roared again and struck me, throwing me through the air to land against the opposite wall.  Th
e motherfucker was damned strong.

I tried to get my legs underneath me to land on my feet, but my legs wouldn’t hold and I fell to the floor.  The Chimera backed against the other wall with a gush of blood and he too fell to the floor.  The bed fell apart as he clipped
the rickety thing on the way by, and my kill bounced off the mattress toward me.  The Chimera’s severed hand danced on its own in the middle of the floor, insanely twitching.  I hoped the fucker was dying.  I hoped like hell he couldn’t heal like an Arm.

Through the blood of combat I saw the Chimera w
ore a layer of piebald brown and white fur, had a muzzle on his face and short wide fingers with claws at the ends.  A twisted black fury roared through me.  I wanted to torture him, make him suffer pain beyond what he ever imagined.  I would sacrifice one of my own fingers simply to hear him scream.

I
would have given anything right then to scream myself, but with my throat cut even breathing wasn’t on the schedule.  Leaning against the wall in a pile of shattered plaster kittens and fallen shelving, unable to stand, I envisioned his death.  My pistol lay only ten feet away but underneath the dresser on my left.  I only had one knife; much as I wanted to throw it at him, I didn’t dare lose my only weapon.

Somehow,
I would make this bastard pay.  He was a juice user, a predator like me, and like me he preyed on and took juice from other Transforms.  He had my juice now, and I wanted my damned juice back!

H
is furry left foot extended only inches from where my right foot twitched from muscle spasms.

Close enough.

I knew I attempted something dangerous.  I knew, from personal experience with a Monster kill, the dangers of strange juice.  I was so profoundly angry I didn’t care (and, to long time readers of my memoirs, this should not surprise).  I extended a toe, reached out to his foot and pulled.  Damn the consequences!  Full speed ahead!

My draw
didn’t work.  I couldn’t quite grab hold of his juice.  Like mist or water his juice kept slipping through my metaphorical fingers.

H
e felt me, though.  His eyes went wide.  For a moment he stopped breathing.  I smiled a tight smile of anger and kept
pulling
.

I started
to get some.  Not much.  Minute, tiny quantities, like the damp on my hands after passing through a mist.  But something.  The Chimera growled and thrashed, all he had in him right then.

My skin began to crawl as I drew
.  Monster juice.  Fuck.  I hurt myself more than I hurt him!  I stopped.

The Chimera stopped roaring and he
watched me warily through those animal eyes.  Did he think Arms were only able to fight and fuck?  He had best not make that complaint, though: bleeding as he was, the creature was still turned on.  He had just taken juice, my juice, and his body responded whether he wanted it to or not, ammunition I could use.

I had only one weapon left to use against the Chimera: words. 
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t even breathe.  I coughed, rubbed my throat and burned juice.  A thick wad of instantly congealed blood pudding flew out of my throat.  Yes!

I loved being an Arm.

After taking several deep breaths I slid my back up the wall and forced a contemptuous expression onto my face as I stared down on the Chimera, an imitation of one of Keaton’s best.  My sneering face covered a black, black fury.

“You must be new at this,” I said, my voice mocking.  “I got off and you’re the one with your prick waving in the breeze.  Anyone ever tell you it’s supposed to be the other way around?”  Rage and high juice let me suppress the terrible pain in my throat, shoulder, abdomen and chest, keeping my tone light and contemptuous.

He snarled at me from the other side of the room, his eyes open inhumanly wide.  The fool thought I was a mute animal!  His fur and canine face made him hard to read, but I couldn’t mistake his mixture of rage and shock.  I remembered something he said earlier…

“Poor baby Chimera.  You lost your kill to me, didn’t you?  Tsk tsk tsk.  Just like you lost your Monster harem of scaly, gushy, furry bed partners.”  I shook my head sadly. 
My act took incredible control.  I amazed even myself at the control I managed.  “She was a really good kill, rich and full of juice.  Taking her juice was wonderful.”  My voice dripped honey and hunger.  “You can’t imagine how good this felt, all that juice just coming right in.”  I let my voice slow, lingering over it, sensual and gloating.  Nothing hurt worse than losing a kill.

“I’m going to
kill
you, Arm!”  His voice growled low with rage and threat, thunder in the small room: huge, male, predator, death incarnate.  “Over and over and over again!”

I laughed at him.  My torn chest burned as my ribs moved but I tuned out
the pain.  I was on the attack.

He roared and rushed me.  Idiot.  He only made two steps before his wounds gaped and the blood gushed. 
Gravity did its floor thing to him, splashing blood and gore around the room, more damage to him.  The skittering severed hand bounced toward me.

I snagged
the severed hand with my left foot, flipped it up, caught it on the end of my knife and stuck it under my left armpit.  The damn thing didn’t stop wiggling.

Mine
.

I laughed again.  “Definitely not good at this,” I said and shook my head.  “I can see how my teacher was able to best the two of you.  Do you miss Mr. Lizard much?  Were you fuck-buddies?”  He did have the
overly manly sense of someone who would consider that sort of insult fighting words.

The bastard bared his teeth at me, growled hatred and
still
refused to die.  The fucker did have Arm-class enhanced healing.  Perhaps better.  I was sure I had cut his heart.  Damn.

“I’m going to kill you, you murderous Arm bitch
.” His lips pulled back in a snarl of pure rage.  “I’m going to split you right open and you’re going to beg for mercy before I let you die.”  No moron him, though.  He didn’t try and rush me again.

I smiled wider, absently twisting the knife between my fingers, and relaxed to a casual contemptuous ease. 
Relaxing cost me, but I had learned control at Keaton’s hands under pain worse than this.  This Chimera hadn’t learned any control.  His buttons were all on the outside, asking to be pushed.

“I like a good fuck after I kill,” I said, “but you weren’t very good.  You might want to work on
your technique.  Oh, and your oversized prick looks ridiculous.  It makes you look like you have some kind of disease.  Next time you get close, I’ll trim junior down some for you.”  I flipped the knife into the air and caught it.  I accidentally joggled my left shoulder when I did and agony stabbed through me, pain so intense blackness crept in at the edges of my vision.  Grimly, I forced down the pain.  I smelled a faint ozone smell and realized I still held a low burn.

“You’re dead, bitch,” he
said, his growl now hinting at his version of my predator effect.  I wasn’t impressed. “That’s a promise.  Name’s Enkidu.  You remember my name, because I’m the one who’s going to kill you.”

“No
,” I said. I shook my head, applying raw willpower to force relaxation, to make the motion seem normal.  “I don’t think so.”  I gave him cold and serious.  “You’re weak, you’re stupid, and you look like a fool trying to pretend to be a predator.  You can’t even get up off the floor.”

I made my point when I stood up.  I had to burn juice to do it, blood dribbled down my neck and gushed down between my legs when I stood, but I made it to my feet.  Hell, I even made
standing look natural.

That shut the fucker up.

Enkidu?  What sort of idiotic name was that?  What was this moron, anyway, some sort of reject from a Harryhausen movie?  Twenty Million Miles to Earth, perhaps?

I sauntered out of the apartment with that contemptuous thought in mind, as casually as if I
didn’t hurt at all.  My saunter cost me a lot of juice, but the growl of raw frustrated fury behind me was worth every bit of the pain.

Carol Hancock: September 24, 1967 – September 25, 1967

I awoke later, hungry, needing to pee, no idea how I
had gotten wherever the hell I was.  I remembered being in periwithdrawal, a Zielinski term for ‘too damned close to withdrawal for comfort’, complete with light sensitivity and the shakes.  I tried to remember anything from after I fled Enkidu, but all I managed to force up were fragments.  A car crash.  A manhunt.  Corn stubble. The sky above, the hounding of tracking dogs I had sent away.  Oh.  The camper.  I hid in a folded down camper.

Of all the damned things, my hands no longer sh
ook, my eyes didn’t overreact to the light.  Nothing made sense to me.  I craved juice like I had never craved juice before.  I would have to think about my situation later, because I wasn’t thinking about it now.

The camper
bumped along with the thrumming vibration of a highway.  Cloud-filtered daylight, but which day?  I smelled industry, which was good.  Perhaps the south side of Chicago?  I waited for the smell of cattle but that smell never came.  Instead, more industry.  Gary?  Too far.  I needed to get out of the camper.

The door had a window, the window had louvers; the louvers were shut. 
No handle attached but after many minutes of scrabbling, I found a handle in a storage slot.  Not being mechanically inclined – in a previous life, people changed light bulbs for me – I took almost ten minutes to solve the problem.  I opened the louvers and in the distance saw…mountains.

Well, at least little mountains.  Or big hills.

This was
not
Chicago.