Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (27 page)

My head rattled around with the memories of my past month’s lessons.  Acrobatics.  Knife-catching.  Balance improvement.  Safecracking.  Oh, and hours on police and FBI procedure, including several tag-alongs with local Philadelphia police officers to learn how they thought and how they worked.

A half-hour into my workout, while doing my rows, I heard a snarl from Keaton: “Shut the fuck up in there.”

Great.  The noise of the machine bothered her.  Her order would trash the hell out of my workout.  I shrugged, grabbed a couple of dumbbells and started in on shoulder presses.  I did three sets of shoulder presses, alternating with sets of incline flies.  There was a small noise as I switched benches between sets, but far softer than the rowing machine.  Keaton didn’t comment, so I didn’t worry.  The dumbbells clacked slightly as I put them back into the rack, but again, the
y only made a small noise.

I didn’t notice my grunts of exertion were louder than the other noises.

So, when I picked up a heavier set of dumbbells for chest presses and turned back to the benches, I found Keaton standing in the entry.  Half-crazed fury filled her eyes.

“I told you to shut the fuck up in here, cunt!”

Oh, I didn’t like the look in her eyes.  I fell to my knees and apologized, sending out all the time-tested submission signs while I studied Keaton with my peripheral vision.

Most of the time Keaton showed only small predator signals: a hunter’s smile, an intense gaze, a motion hinting of a stalk.  Not this time.  She came towards me with a graceful, inhuman motion
containing more than the hint of a stalk.  Hands in fists, mouth twisted into a snarl, eyebrows lowered, chin jutting.  A real stalk.  She didn’t even register my groveling, far too upset over what normally would be a minor annoyance.

When she got within ten feet away from me, I decided nobody was
home behind her eyes.  Fuck abject submission!  I ran.

This wasn’t stupid panic.  This was a rational decision.  I
had been an Arm for ten months, and I moved damned fast when I wanted to, even if I couldn’t burn.  After she cut my throat in May, I realized Keaton would eventually kill me in one of her over-the-top psychotic rages.  I had only seen two, but two was enough.  I couldn’t predict them.  The trigger might be some annoyance from her private life while she was low on juice, or something I did, or something I had never seen before.  I had been lucky to survive her first two rages, but eventually my luck would run out.  I kept a watchful eye out and relied on my contingency planning skills.

Well, with all my time and experience, I had gotten good enough to recognize an over-the-top Keatonic psychotic rage.  This was
it
, as in St. Louis when I beat the FBI’s death order, escaping from them and from withdrawal.  I had multiple escape plans for the quickest way out of the warehouse.  I had recruits set up in Philadelphia and elsewhere to patch me back together, move me far away and keep me out of sight until Keaton calmed down.  I had plans for Los Angeles and plans for how to defend myself at a distance.  I even had a two-thug snatch team on call, ready to grab Zielinski on my command.

My emergency plans weren’t foolproof.  I hoped I would never use them.

However, here it was, the emergency.

Unfortunately, my opposition wasn’t a pack of FBI agents and Detention Center guards, but an Arm.

I rolled when I got to the garage door and lifted the door the bare foot or so I needed to squeeze underneath.  I knew the garage door would slow me down.  I just prayed the door wouldn’t slow me down too much.  I had to get out of the warehouse to use my emergency plans.  Inside, the situation would turn into a flat-out race I couldn’t win.  Not with Keaton chasing me.  Not with Keaton able to burn.

I rolled under the door, smelled the smog, saw the sky, found my number two motorcycle with its boot filled with smoke grenades.  I levered the garage door down…and failed.  Keaton grabbed my shoulder, rolled up the door enough to pull me back in and slammed me against the car and on the bounce, the floor.  I smelled juice; she burned juice she didn’t have when she gave chase, leaving her edging into withdrawal and me facing a mindless and fatally dangerous Arm.

Keaton tossed something around my neck as I tried to buck my way out of her hold.  I pulled myself up, but Keaton wrapped her legs around my legs and down I went.  I pulled at the thing around my neck and found hard, thick leather.  Keaton kept a steel grip on the thick belt and I couldn’t get it off of me.  My vision grayed out from lack of air and lack of blood to my brain.  A normal would have been unconscious, but as an Arm I got to lay helpless and conscious for who knows how many minutes, stewing in my own juice.

When Keaton loosened the tie around my neck, I sprang back to life.  I found myself immobile, hanging by my wrists from the squat rack.  She
had chained my ankles to the bottom and a bar in the middle of my back forced my torso forward.  I recognized the setup; we had used this arrangement before, on several now-dead victims.  Keaton allowed me long enough to realize my situation before she tightened the tie on my neck again.  I hadn’t caught my breath from the last time.

I knew what she planned to do to me.  I had been through this routine on the other side.  She would make me panic.  She would give me pain beyond what I could bear.  She would rip through my defenses, shatter me, revel in my helplessness…and in the end leave me a broken, mangled wreck.  Finally, when nothing remained of my mind, she would kill me.

I couldn’t do a thing to stop her.

My vision grayed out again.

I don’t know how long she played with me.  It seemed like forever as she doled out one precious breath at a time, all the while a sadistic gleam in her eyes.  One time when my vision came back, I couldn’t see her.  She left the tie on my neck, too tight for me to breathe naturally, but not too tight to keep me from scraping in one precious lung-full of air at a time.

I heard the cart, her cart of torture supplies.  I had hauled the sorry cart too many times from the weapon room to various points in the warehouse not to know what the damned thing sounded like.  I had cleaned the blood off the instruments too many times to not know what came next.

“Please,” I begged, through my rasping gasps for air, when I saw her return.  “Please.  Anything.  I’ll do.  Anything.”

She screamed, offended at my words.  She upset the cart and did a spin-kick into my ribcage.  Ribs cracked.  She didn’t stop, and in a never-ending screaming berserk rage she pummeled me until she exhausted herself.  No, there wasn’t anyone home.  She fought so badly that if I had been free, I would have been able to take her.  This psychotic demon was not my teacher.

Exhausted at last, she sat down and admired her work, what she had done to me.  She smiled a mad half smile, took out her knife, and slowly, carefully, sliced a hole in the left side of my shirt, where she observed the purpled bruise of the first ribs she cracked.  Slice.  Into my skin, not deep at all.  Nearly without pain.

She stood back and admired her work: the play of the trickle of blood on my skin and the pattern the blood made on my shirt.

Something about the half giggle that escaped her lips got to me.  Something about how she carved out a raw picture of me on the inside of her forearm with a miniature scalpel, like a plan or something.  Something about the way she held her thumb and fingers out like an ‘L’, movie director style
, when she studied me.  Something about the way she lovingly put her torture-tool cart upright and loaded it back up.  In any event, I panicked.

To her, I
had become a piece of art.

I don’t know how long she tortured me.  To me, forever.  Certainly hours passed, but less than all night, because the dawn did not come.  She knew things about pain I hadn’t even conceived of.  The torture went on and on and on.  I did nothing but panic and endure.  And breathe, but even breathing was difficult.

Breathe.  Breathe.  Breathe.

She carved away the fingernails of both hands and drove her knife into the raw flesh beneath.  She carved away much of my flesh with the little knife of hers.  Much of the rest she burned.  She worked slow and cruel.  Several times, she paused in her madness, to let me think I had hope.  That I just might possibly survive.  Then she crushed my hope with some new inventive cruelty.  The juice slowly dribbled out of me as I worked to keep myself alive.  That, too, was part of the torture.

All she left me with was the will to live.  No juice.  No way to fight the pain.  No way to quell the fear.  As an Arm, I couldn’t even pass out or retreat into shock.

On the knife-edge of death, my world became pain.

Breathe.  Breathe.  Breathe.

At some point in my struggles, the pain stopped.  I forced my eyes open.  Nothing.  I concentrated my hearing.  Nothing.  I flickered my metasense on and off.  Nothing.  The damned demon was gone.

In the entire time since I ran, she hadn’t said a word.

I still hung from the rack.  The tie still clinched tight around my neck.  Each breath I took still hurt.

I summoned up the energy to pull on my right wrist.  The shackle held tight.  The little effort sent waves of pain washing through me, and pulled me back to the abyss.  A long time passed before I came out of it.

The demon was still gone.

I needed juice.  The need burned inside.

I was hungry and thirsty.  Voices gibbered in my head.

The world still
reverberated with pain.  The weight of my body on my wrists and arms and shoulders made each gasp of air a spear of fire through my torso.  My muscles screamed in misery.  My lungs wouldn’t fully fill anymore.  My abdomen felt dipped in flame.  My hands and feet were agony.  My clothes were gone or charred to my skin, and filth and gore covered me.  I heard the steady drip, drip of blood dropping to the warehouse floor.  My blood.

I couldn’t get down.  I couldn’t even move.  Simple breathing took all my energy and will.

I watched the line in the warehouse where the roof joined the wall, the wall that contained the doors.  I couldn’t move my head, so I had nothing else to see.  I wanted to relax my neck and let my head fall, but if I did, it fell backwards and I couldn’t breathe.  I held my head up and watched the ceiling.  It hurt to hold my head up so long.

I had no choice.

Breathe.  Breathe.  Breathe.

Slowly, the line of light crossed the warehouse and dimmed.  A full day.  At the end, I lived but I still dripped blood.  Not good.  As an Arm, I should be able to heal from anything.  Some juice remained, but
my lack of juice tormented me, far beyond my other pains.  I felt every second of the day pass.  During the day, I learned to ignore pain the hard way.

Only after the sun set did I finally succumb.

I walked on clouds.  Ahead of me, a huge wall rose high, into the haze above.  A road made of what appeared to be gold brick led to an opening in the wall.  The gates across the opening shimmered, almost as if made of pearl.

Oh.  I was dead.

I looked around for the expected crowd of people, but found nobody, except for a man s
itting behind a desk.  He was a tall, burly man, wearing white robes and a halo.  I found myself standing on the other side of the desk and didn’t notice crossing the distance in between.  “Name?” he asked.

“Carol Hancock.”

“Hmm,” he said as he paged through an immense book open on the desk in front of him.  After a moment, he found the page with my name at the top.  He quickly skimmed the page, and then shook his head sadly.  “Sorry.  You aren’t approved.”

“Oh.”  I didn’t know what to say, taken aback by the swift judgment.  “That’s it?  Just a couple of seconds and I’m not approved?”

The man shrugged.  “You had your whole life to influence the decision.”

“Well, pardon me for dying.  So what happens now?”

He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head over to the side, to where the clouds ended.  I followed his gaze to see flames far below.  The occasional scream wafted up.

“I’m not really dead, you know,” I said.  “I’m hallucinating this.”

“Well, that’s good to know.  I’d hate to think anything this cliché was real.”  His tone was sardonic.  Somehow, I never imagined St. Peter as sardonic.  “Since this is a hallucination, you can relax.  No reason to worry about your soul at all.”

Hell.  I ran my fingers through my hair.

“What am I supposed to do about my soul?” I asked, frustrated.  “I’m an Arm.  I’m evil.”  He shrugged.

I threw my hands in the air.  “You tell me.  You’re the saint.  I didn’t turn myself into an Arm, He did.  Why would He do something like this?”

“You expect a simple fisherman to explain why He does what He does?”

“Well, He turned me into a predator.  How am I supposed to get into Heaven after being turned into a predator?”

St. Peter came out from behind the desk and leaned back with his hip against it and his arms crossed.  “You’re certainly not the only predator He’s ever made.  Besides, the judgment isn’t ever about what He made you, it’s about what you do with what you’ve been given.”