All Beasts Together (The Commander) (52 page)

I moved, moved, moved, reloaded
as I moved, and moved.  A hit from a pistol wouldn’t take me down.  A small-bore rifle wouldn’t either if I was lucky.  I knew they had heavier weapons, and I knew they could do things to me I wouldn’t be able to ignore, burning juice or no burning juice.

I kept going. 
The shooting had started only seconds ago and I was already almost out.  I came up to the next barricade of cars and scurried over them, the dozen troopers who had been in my way now a half dozen functionals behind me.  Hell, some of the troopers and FBI agents hadn’t reacted enough to
start
shooting yet.

As I leapt I looked ahead and
found yet another barrier of Illinois State Troopers as well as some cops from Joliette and Aurora.  What the fuck were so fucking many State Troopers doing here?  Mayor Daley was going to have apoplexy!

I wasn’t out.

How many waited for me after
this
layer?  This trap was massive, but the scurrying ahead of me showed chaos and haste.  They weren’t properly prepared.  How many authorities had they called in on this?  How did they arrange all of this so quickly that my informants and lookouts had missed it?

At the top of my leap I met a bullet with my name on it.  I didn’t notice th
e shot when it hit me, but I did realize something was wrong when I landed: I tried to land with my feet running, but my legs didn’t respond. They didn’t reach out. They didn’t start running.  They didn’t move at all.  When I landed they collapsed underneath me like last year’s New Year’s resolutions, and I fell to the ground.

I felt nothing from my legs.

I knew what had happened, and no, I hadn’t forgotten Keaton’s old aphorism about bullets being faster than juice.  Dammit, why fucking now!  I had been close to getting away!

The Troopers kept firing when I fell, a real hail of bullets. 
They hit me in the chest and the shoulders and in my now numb hips.  I tried to cover my head with my arms but one arm didn’t move for me.  A horrible panic of helplessness bit into me as I realized I was about to die.  All those troopers needed was one clean head-shot.

“
Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!”

Most of the firing stopped when the voice called out, although I was hit twice more before the shots stopped completely.  The shocking stillness that comes after the horrible fury of the guns filled the void.  I heard police radios and the quiet clinking of spent shells, the murmur of voices and the sound of hushed anticipation.

I lay helpless on the ground, my face pressed into the pavement, eating sand and ice and old road salt.  I still held the burn, using the juice to keep me alive and heal me from the should-be-fatal wounds.  I couldn’t catalog them all.  I had holes in my chest and blood pooled in a huge puddle all around me, crackling and steaming against the thin ice glazing the road.  I could move nothing of my body from the waist down and my often injured left arm was half torn off and I couldn’t move that either. When I tried to move or lift my head, a nasty grinding noise accompanied the motion, causing pain only tolerable because of the burn.  The burn kept going and going.  The juice flowed out of me fast.  Too fast.

I
lay helpless on the ground from one lucky shot, no longer the masterful predator, falling fast into death.  Stark panic grabbed hold of me, but I forced the panic back down to a bitter little ball in the bottom of my stomach.  Soon, I would be hallucinating, the way I always did when I was wounded and down on juice.

T
he clicking noise of footsteps approached, firm and sure and coming closer, threatening because of my vulnerability.

“Well, well, Carol.  It seems I was right.”  Special Agent McIntyre,
an old enemy from my days in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center.  This FBI bigot had called me a rabid animal back when I was still mostly a normal human.  He and his cruelty had driven me into Keaton’s grasp.

I ignored the grinding
, stabbing pain in my shoulder as I turned my head toward him.  He was medium height and lean, wearing a blue suit that looked like a uniform on him.  A fury grew in me with the chilling finality of my end.  Even wounded and vulnerable and helpless I was still more dangerous than he could even dream.  It would not be today, but if by some miracle I survived this debacle the time would come and I would take him and I would destroy him.  I would shred his body and shatter his mind.  His screaming would be my music for days on end as I destroyed him piece by tiny piece.

I
stared into his eyes with mine and I let him face the death there, the predator who preys on humans, the monster of his nightmares.  He saw those eyes and took a step back.

McIntyre controlled himself, though.  No matter how dangerous
I was to his gut, with his head he knew I lay helpless on the ground.  He called four State Troopers forward.  They all pointed their service firearms at me.

“You have a choice, Hancock,” he told me.  His voice
stayed professionally cold, but a thrill of victory hid within his words. “You can give me one single motion of trouble.  Just one single hint, and these men will blow your brains out here on the pavement.

“Or you can cooperate.
You can do exactly what you’re told and maybe you’ll get to live.”

He
glared at me.  I looked at the troopers.  They were nervous, but they appeared very willing to shoot me if they had an excuse.  I had killed many people.  They wanted to kill me.  Many of the faces on the milling State Troopers behind McIntyre were black with anger.

“Colvin here is going to cuff you and you’re going to let him.”  McIntyre said.  “If you give any trouble, you’re dead.  Put your arms out for him, Hancock.”

The animal inside of me screamed its fury and its pain.  I couldn’t let them touch me!  Pain-maddened unreason wanted to snarl, strike, kill anyone who dared come near.

If I
gave in to my combat lust, I would die right now.

If I stalled, I
would die a few minutes from now.

I
recognized the old choice, one I had faced before.  Enter the bowels of Hell and pay in my own pain for a slim chance of survival…or stay where I was and face death now.

I made the same choice this time I had made before.

Slowly, I extended my right arm in front of me.  I couldn’t move my left for him, but McIntyre understood.  He waved Colvin forward and Colvin came toward me with the cuffs.  A sheen of sweat showed on his upper lip despite the cold.  I frightened him, but he was a mean SOB State Trooper, half-animal himself, and he would die before he would admit his fear.  He put one side of the handcuffs around my right wrist.  I could have killed him right then.  I could have grabbed his neck with my one good arm and snapped it, but if I did that, I would be dead a few seconds later.  I let him put the cuff on.  Then he grabbed my left wrist, forced it forward and cuffed that, too.  A searing blast of agony shot through my ruined shoulder, but I was used to pain.  I didn’t do more than catch my breath.  They even cuffed my legs, despite the obvious.

McIntyre smiled, then, and started shouting.
“All right, we’ve got her.  Capture team, get over here with the equipment.  Move, men, move!”  They moved a thick steel stretcher with three quarter inch thick shackles over to me.

M
y heart skipped a beat when I saw Officer Canon.  Officer Canon wore a State Trooper uniform, carried a large bore hunting rifle in her hand, and stood behind Agent McIntyre.  I realized then I had been had, how this had all come about.  Focus Canon had arranged for my destruction using her Major Transform tricks.

I damned her betrayal with what I suspected was my last breath.
  It’s always the unexpected that destroys you in the end, and this was totally unexpected.  The Government was the enemy of all Transforms!  No Major Transform in their right mind should be cooperating with the Government on something like this.

Officer Canon
smiled when I recognized her, made a throat cutting motion, and slowly melted back into the mob of FBI and State Troopers.

I
n the far distance I heard Chimeras howl, at least five.

I closed my eyes and let the healing take me down.

Gilgamesh

One, two, then three lines of State Troopers and Chicago City Police trotted past him toward the fighting.  On the other side of Pete’s Gym, Tiamat ran over one line of police, then two, and through a building and out on Brown, heading toward him but two blocks to the south.  Of all things he started to have a hard time metasensing her.

Then Tiamat fell and didn’t get up.  Gilgamesh’s heart lurched and
he buried his head in his hands, letting his metasense grow fuzzy and unfocused.  Tiamat had fallen.  Bundled up and captured as well, he guessed.  Her glow weakened, reflecting wounds.  She might not live.  He whimpered in shared agony.

Chimera howls to the west brought him out of his panic.  Hell.  Five Beast Men
ran this way.  After him.  Enkidu was one of the five.

No metasense shielding this time
, and they sounded exultant, triumphant.

This attack seemed
opportunistic, not a plan, as they all came from the same direction, not far apart from each other, and they didn’t have their packs with them.  Hadn’t they known he was here?  Had he managed to damp his glow so successfully?

Gilgamesh found himself in his Chevy truck without realizing how he got there, the truck
already started and moving.  One squad of Chicago City cops stopped him, checked him out and waved him through, the Crow ‘I’m nobody, I’m not even here’ magic doing its thing.

Climax stress yet again? 
He suspected so; he could barely drive.  Drunks drove better than this.  Those nice lines on the pavement swayed and wobbled as bad as he did.

Where was he?  He looked for a street sign.  Niles Center Road.  What was he doing on Niles Center?  He needed to get over to the Edens Expressway before the Beast Men got him.

Niles Center would take him to Dempster, though, and Dempster would take him to the Edens.

To his surprise the Beast Men slowed about a mile and a half west of him, where the small North Chicago River roughly paralleled a set of north-south running train tracks. 
He didn’t know why.  Hadn’t they metasensed him yet?

Gilgamesh turned left on Dempster, sideswiping a beat up baby blue Pontiac and collecting curses from the other driver.  “Shit.  Shit.  Shit,” Gilgamesh said, whispering, shaking and hoping.  His truck slid a few feet on some glare ice – wasn’t this winter ever going to end? – before he got control of the truck again and rolled on.

Now the Beast Men charged him.  His almost accident must have broken his concentration enough to let his glow shine through.  Although Beast Men had a hard time metasensing Crows, he guessed they had been looking.  The light at Grosse Point remained green as he rolled on through, thank God, and he rolled up the Edens entrance ramp and on the Expressway proper.

Enkidu rumbled ahead of the other Beast Men and came into sight, on the Expressway itself, perhaps two hundred yards ahead of Gilgamesh but on the southbound side. 
The few vehicles on the Expressway screeched to a halt, or tried to, as one eighteen wheeler rolled and jackknifed.  Enkidu leapt over it, over the center dividers and to the northbound side, where Gilgamesh urged his truck north and faster through almost no traffic.  Enkidu had the angle on him.

Gilgamesh knew that Enkidu couldn’t maintain
so swift a sprint for long.  As Enkidu approached to either barrel into Gilgamesh’s truck, leap on the flatbed or slash his tires, Gilgamesh leaned his head and left arm out the window and sicked up, the sick-up catching Enkidu head on.  Gilgamesh was full up on Arm dross and way into climax stress, giving him far more sick-up than he ever possessed before.  Enkidu couldn’t avoid his sick-up and fell, rolling twice before righting himself…behind Gilgamesh’s truck.  He continued his sprint, but too late.  Gilgamesh’s giant sick-up bought him just enough time to escape.

Spots swam before Gilgamesh’s eyes. 
His panicked sick-up had used every bit of juice inside him and he felt weak and exhausted.  He had gotten away, though, this time by his own skill.

Meandering from lane to lane and slowing to a more reasonable 45 miles an hour, Gilgamesh drove north, ever north, not knowing at all what he was going to do with himself
this time
.

The
Government had taken Carol!

“The Cause was the name we gave, early on, to the fight against the inevitable Transform demographic disaster.  Until the Cause went beyond my household and my local clique of Focuses, not only did I fail more often than I succeeded, I did more harm to the Cause than good.  It was an impossible era, filled with impossible problems and staggering burdens, burdens we faced while trapped in a chasm of ignorance.  Until by some mischance – or the machinations of the Madonna of Montreal – Carol and Sky taught me to trust myself, let loose the Cause and let it spread through them to other Transforms, my failure was preordained.  Though we never saw the dangers, without the Cause we would have never been able to handle the other threats we faced and we, the American Focuses, would have continued on our greased path to Hell and become something else, something horrific.”