Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (28 page)

I sighed and studied the clouds below my feet.  They looked like white cotton candy, and my feet didn’t touch them.  Being tortured didn’t seem to do much for my imagination.  “I haven’t done much with what He made me,” I
admitted.

“Doesn’t appear to be so, no,” he said.  He talked with a Yankee accent.  “Hmm.  Third rate thug, self-centered vindictiveness, sadism and murder for its own sake.  Not an impressive performance,
predator
.”

“But I’m evil!  I’m supposed to act like that.”

He looked at me and didn’t speak.

“All right, what
am
I supposed to act like?” I asked.  “I tried to act like a decent human being and it turned into a complete disaster.  I’m different than I used to be.  The old rules don’t work for me anymore.”

Still no answer.

I paced.  “So okay, if the old rules don’t work for me anymore, does that mean evil is just as inappropriate as good?  Classic good and evil are all human definitions, aren’t they?  If I can’t be good from a normal human standpoint, perhaps I shouldn’t assume evil is my only alternative.”

“Hmm?”

“So what
is
my alternative?  The only rules I understand are the old human rules, and I already know those don’t work.  What are the new rules?  I’m willing to live the way I’m supposed to, if I can figure out what the rules are.”

St. Peter didn’t answer.

I stalked back and forth across the gold brick.  “Where do I not fit standard human evil?”  I stopped and spread my arms wide, questioningly.  “I thought at first that I couldn’t care for people any more.  Am I right?  Sometimes I don’t care, but sometimes I think I care for Ed and Bobby.  However, why do I care for places now, too?  Is that evil?  When the people of Newark rioted this summer, it hurt as much as when I lost my Grandmother three years ago.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t have any idea what I am.  Keaton certainly doesn’t.  She’s evil and likes it, but she’s in a trap.  She’s wrong.  ‘Predator’ is far too limiting.  It’s like saying ‘humans are omnivores’ and letting the word ‘omnivore’ define humanity.  I need to understand what I’ve become.  Is that what you’ve been waiting for me to say?”

“It means you’re evil,” Dr. Manigault said from behind me.  I was in chains, in the Detention Center suicide room.  “You’re nothing but an abomination.  Everything you deservedly suffer through, you did or will do to others.  When you die, you’ll go to Hell and suffer for all eternity.  There is no redemption for your kind.  Never ever ever.  You’re evil, evil, evil.”

“You’re not evil,” Special Agent McIntyre said.  I found myself tied to the bullet-riddled concrete post in the Detention Center courtyard.  “You’re an animal.  Animals can’t be evil.  You’re no more human than my pet dog.
You’re a disposable commodity.”

“Come on in here, little heifer,” Uncle Herbie said, and I smelled the slaughterhouse reek.
“Come on in…”

“Let’s go hunt Monsters and save the world!” Special Agent Bates and Dr. Zielinski said, chirping like birds.  They came to me up here in the white cotton clouds, skipping like schoolgirls.  They took me by the hand, but we all stumbled when we got to the edge of the clouds.

Down we all fell into the far abyss.

Part 3
By the Light of a False Dawn

“To straighten the crooked

you must first do a harder thing -

straighten yourself.

You are the only master.
Who else?

Subdue yourself,

and discover your master.”

– The Buddha

Arms have enhanced eyesight, enhanced reactions, enhanced hearing, enhanced smell, enhanced touch, enhanced muscles, enhanced balance, enhanced taste, immunity to intoxicants and poisons, enhanced healing, and many other things too obscure to even contemplate.  Still, a bullet through the brain will kill them just as dead as it will kill you.  None of the Arm capabilities violate
s a single law of physics or chemistry, despite what the Bible-thumping preachers and the Arm-loving fans say.

“The Book of Arms”

A half mile from the warehouse, Gilgamesh and the other Crows prepared as Tiamat began to die.  She had been gutted and immobile for nearly forty-eight hours.  The late afternoon summer sun beat down on them as they stood at the bus stop on Bartram.  The bus wouldn’t show for another half hour, according to the listed schedule.

“I’m ready,” Wire said.  Wire crept toward the warehouse, shivering all the while.  The other Crows followed with murmurs of encouragement.  Gilgamesh concentrated on the back of Wire’s head, scared.

Wire planned to go in to help Tiamat.  The rest of them followed as best as possible.  The older Crow continued forward, not looking at them, terrified for the first time Gilgamesh had ever seen.  His already pale complexion had become white as a sheet.

Tiamat might be close to death but she was still Tiamat, the goddess of destruction.

Wire crept forward to the intersection of Bartram and Holstein and turned on Holstein.  A quarter mile from the warehouse, Gilgamesh’s nerves failed and he stopped following, the first to do so.

Sinclair stopped ten paces farther in, unable to take his eyes off the now stationary Gilgamesh.

A hundred yards further on Ezekiel’s nerve failed.  He turned and ran.

Three hundred yards from the warehouse, Tolstoy stopped.

Wire sicked up some of his dross when he realized Tolstoy no longer followed.  Despite his distress, he continued to creep forward, his teeth gritted and his fist clenched.  Gilgamesh kept expecting him to stop, but he never did.  Step after step.  He sicked up dross twice more but managed to get all the way to the warehouse door.

Inside the warehouse, Tiamat hung, struggling for air, leaking dross like a dripping faucet.  Dying.

Wire struggled to breathe and closed his eyes to meditate, unable to move forward.  Fifteen minutes later, Wire opened his eyes and reached for the door, which Skinner had closed so hard on her way out it bounced.  He touched the handle to raise it the few necessary inches and took a step back in horror, as if electrically shocked.  One step became two, then a dozen, then a run.  Sinclair and Tolstoy bolted when Wire ran and rushed back, past Gilgamesh.

Tiamat still hung, dying.  Gilgamesh took a deep breath and stood his ground.

Wire stopped when he got to where Gilgamesh still stood, frozen.

“Gilgamesh?” Wire said, his voice hoarse and rough.  “Snap out of it, kid.  Let’s go.”

“We can’t leave her,” Gilgamesh said, his whisper almost inaudible to him.

“I’m sorry.”  Wire looked down, ashamed, even after he had gone so much farther than any of them.  Tears streaked down his still pale face.  “I can’t do it.”

Gilgamesh clenched his hands into fists.  “We’re feeding each other’s panic.  Look at us!  We can get right up next to the door of the warehouse most of the time.  Surely we can find a way
to get there now.”

The expression of tight panic on Wire’s face faded.  A couple blocks away, Gilgamesh sensed both Sinclair and Tolstoy stop running.  Ezekiel hadn’t stopped.

“You think so?” Wire said.  “How?”

Gilgamesh nodded, short and sharp.  “My panic faded when I stopped moving forward.  It wasn’t my panic I experienced; it was yours and everyone’s.  Some kind of giant feedback loop based on our ability to pick up emotions through our metasense.  As soon as I stepped out of the loop, the panic went away.”

Wire stared off into the distance and his breathing gradually returned to normal.  “We did it to ourselves.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “We’ve got to do something.  If we understand the problem, that should help.”

Wire turned back to Gilgamesh; Wire’s exhausted eyes told him the high cost of Wire’s attempt.

“I guess it’s my turn to try, isn’t it?” Gilgamesh said, his voice tight and high.

“I guess we’ll get to find out how crazy you really are,” Wire said.  ‘Crazy’ meant ‘brave’.

Gilgamesh nodded.  His faded panic returned, his heart beating hard enough to make his throat throb, just at the thought of ‘his turn now’.  “Can you help?  I don’t know, just…don’t panic me.  Support or something.  Something calm.  Hell, talk about the Phillies, for gosh sakes.”

Wire spat.  “Talking about the Phillies is
not
calming.”

Well, that was the truth.

“Give it a shot, young Crow hero,” Wire said.  He nodded formally to Gilgamesh and walked back to the others.

So, what did his Crow friends decide to talk about?  Tall tales about Hera’s exploits, of all things.  Their stories might calm them, but Gilgamesh had to repress the urge to go back and chew them out.  Talking about Focuses did not calm Gilgamesh down.

Of course, if he chewed them out he would panic even more, and…

The best thing to do was to get far enough away so he couldn’t hear them yakking.  Hera had been on the local TV news three days ago, going on about some Monster conversion in a high school in Fort Lauderdale, and the massacre that followed.  They might consider the subject calming, but Gilgamesh didn’t.

Their words were better than the pressure of their panic.  Without the other Crows, he crept forward.  Slowly.  Twilight turned toward night and he found his going easier, especially if he stopped to take a few sips of dross every few minutes from the immense dross pool created from Tiamat’s injuries.  Just after sunset, he reached the warehouse door.

He hadn’t sicked-up at all.

Opening the heavy corrugated steel door took all his nerve.

The stench in the warehouse nearly knocked him over.  Blood and piss and shit.  Terror and pain and lust.  Burnt flesh, juice, and madness.  His skin crawled and he knew he entered a place he didn’t remotely belong.

It’s only bad odors, he told himself.  He had smelled worse in his time as a Crow.  Some he had eaten for dinner.  He pushed the panic down and stepped past the row of concealing boxes into the warehouse itself.

Tiamat appeared as a formless shape in the darkness, barely alive.  She had been deteriorating badly as he approached, her deterioration one of the things that pressed him forward.  Gilgamesh approached the mess of her, strung up in an impossible convoluted position…

Had the Skinner done this on purpose?  She had actually
crucified
Tiamat, save for the part about the legs.  Instead of hanging straight down, her legs spread wide, bent at the knees, and extended out behind Tiamat, shackled to the metal contraption behind her.  Tiamat’s incredible weight dragged down on her arms, and she hung with her knees about four inches off the floor.  A true crucifixion.

Gilgamesh looked the Arm over with care.  She was beautiful, even like this.  He had imagined her as a terrible Monster, a parody of humanity.  No, she possessed the beauty of youth, powerful and muscular, perfectly formed for what she was.  Predator.  Amazon warrior-woman.  Goddess.

He hadn’t expected beauty or his reaction to it.  Tiamat’s appearance exploded his preconceptions of her as a semi-divine source of dross.  She was, instead, an exotic and beautiful Major Transform, with a captivating glow whispering to his secret longings.

Burns and horrific wounds covered Tiamat, but he had been around Tiamat long enough to know none of them were life threatening.  Tiamat’s real problem was the strap around her neck.  Barely able to breathe, her rare breaths came only once every minute or so.  Her heart beat off rhythm, and not often.  With her lungs filled with fluid from the crucifixion, he knew her death approached.

Crucifying a goddess was bad form.  This sort of thing would lead to major social repercussions in the months and years ahead.  Bad Skinner!  Bad Skinner!

Gilgamesh grinned, giddy with stress.  His feet felt like they ever so slightly floated above the floor.  Had he gone somewhere beyond panic?  His question increased his panic, so he turned his metasense to his Crow friends for a few moments, to calm himself down.  He wasn’t sure, but…yes, they
were listening to the Phillies game on a transistor radio.

The Phillies were losing.  Fancy that.

Even after her divine destruction, Tiamat was terrifying.  Beautiful and terrible all at once.  His knees buckled in awe of her presence, but he stopped himself before he fell to the floor.  Her mortal human form had failed, not the divine spark in her that he worshipped.  She needed his help.

The first thing he had to do was to loosen the whatever-it-was constricting her neck.  He went around behind her and began to work on the thick leather strap.  He hardly believed his hands and eyes: her neck was as thick as his thighs.  It took him fifteen minutes but he did succeed in loosening the knot, all the while fighting the urge to lose himself in the beauty of her glow.

He couldn’t cut the tie around Tiamat’s neck; if he did, the Skinner would know someone had helped Tiamat.  Gilgamesh couldn’t even think about doing something that might reveal his help.