Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (33 page)

This mess was his fault; he bore the blame for the Crow’s death.  This poor Crow must have thought Gilgamesh led John to him.  Gilgamesh stood in a side alley for long moments, cursing himself for his own mistakes.  Tears of grief and shame pooled in the corners of his eyes, and he blinked them back.

Leading John toward another Crow was a bad thing.  Because John wasn’t a Crow.

With horror, Gilgamesh metasensed John run down a woman, drag her into an alley, and rape her.

No, John was no Crow.  John was a Beast Man.  All the other Crows had said that Beast Men were dangerous.  They were right.

---

Gilgamesh waited silently at the broken-in apartment door.  He had taken three long hours to work up his courage to go back and face John Doe.  But he had to.  He couldn’t waste the opportunity to learn from a Beast Man too young to be much of a danger.

John Doe didn’t notice Gilgamesh
waiting at his door.  Eventually, Gilgamesh knocked.  John Doe twitched, startled, but he didn’t move from his position on the bed in the filthy, reeking tenement.

“Gilgamesh?
I didn’t realize you were here.”

Perhaps Beast Men couldn’t easily metasense Crows.  Gilgamesh didn’t have any problem metasensing John, though.

“I thought you would have sensed me,” Gilgamesh said, pleased at his steady voice, despite the pounding in his chest.

“I can now, but you sort of fade into the background if I’m not paying attention.”

He didn’t say anything more.  Gilgamesh waited.  Finally, John spoke again.

“Are you going to kill me?”

Gilgamesh didn’t expect John’s question.  “I wasn’t planning to,” he said.

John Doe clenched his hands in his hair.  “I’m not a Crow, Gilgamesh.  I’m a Beast Man.  I’m hardly a man at all anymore.  I’m a fucking
Monster
.”

He turned over finally and sat up on the mattress.

Gilgamesh took a breath in shock.  If not for his rigid control, he would have fled.

John Doe’s skin had changed.  A large brown patch covered the left side of his face, disappearing under his hair and his beard.  A rough five o’clock shadow covered his face, coming in white except over the brown patch, which came in brown.

“Look at me!” John said.  He ripped off his shirt, exposing his bare chest.  Distantly, Gilgamesh winced at the damage to his second-best shirt.

John Doe’s chest was all brown and white, covered in blotches in a piebald pattern all down his torso and arms.  Even one of his hands was brown, and the other white.  Over all his body
grew a rough five o’clock shadow, coming in brown and white.

Fur.

Gilgamesh eased back a step.  Monsters changed like this.  John Doe wasn’t some hapless normal who had turned into a Monster, though.  He had gone through a major transformation.  He used juice in huge quantities, Arm quantities.  He would go through more changes than growing a little fur.  From what the woman Transform, Sadie, had said to him, he expected a Beast Man would turn into a beast.  Eventually.

What made him a Major Transform, though?  “Can you control it?” Gilgamesh asked.

“What?” John Doe asked, startled out of his misery.

Gilgamesh didn’t answer.

“I never tried to control the changes,” John Doe said.  He curled up again, hunched over his knees, burying his head in his arms.  “I don’t know how to control it.”  John paused.  “The transformation’s doing other things to me, Gilgamesh.  I can feel it in my mind.  I’m having trouble thinking straight.”

The admission didn’t surprise Gilgamesh.  The Beast Man Thomas the Dreamer and his crew
had hunted spoke only in baby talk.  Gilgamesh sank down to the floor and sat, calm, stable and reassuring.  “You’re a Major Transform.  I’m positive you can control your bodily changes.”

“I did something awful a little while ago,” John Doe said, his head still buried in his arms.

Gilgamesh made a polite prompting noise.

“I didn’t mean what I did!  She was just there and I wanted her right then.  I took her right then on the pavement.  I don’t even remember if she agreed.”

Gilgamesh remained silent.  John Doe didn’t say anything for a long time.

“She didn’t agree,” John said, his voice quiet.  “I was high as a kite and horny as hell, and I didn’t care what she wanted.  I raped the girl.  I don’t even know if she lived.”  The whisper was even softer this time.

“She lived,” Gilgamesh said.  That much sympathy he could offer.  John Doe didn’t choose to become a Beast Man instead of a Crow.

However,
Gilgamesh didn’t choose to become his prey, either.

John Doe turned his face aside, and buried deeper into his arms.

“You saw,” he said.

Gilgamesh didn’t answer.  Eventually, John Doe spoke again.

“What do I do now?” he asked.

“You survive.”
Gilgamesh knew the answer to that one.  “You figure out what you can do, you deal with the problems one at a time, and you survive.  If you’re lucky, you figure out how to live with yourself.”

John took his face out of his arms, his piebald face astonished.

“You don’t hate me? After what I did?”

“No,” Gilgamesh said.  Fear him, yes.  Hate, no.

“Tell me what to do.”

“Tell me what you
can
do,” Gilgamesh said.

John talked.  For the next hour, Gilgamesh worked with John Doe, questioning him, experimenting, determining John Doe’s capabilities.

John Doe’s metasense range was about the same as Gilgamesh’s, a little less than five miles, but his metasense wasn’t as good.  He picked up Transforms with ease, but couldn’t metasense dross unless Gilgamesh told him about the dross first.  Gilgamesh guessed this to be survival-based.  The extreme sensitivity to dross was survival to a Crow.  To a Beast Man, who got so little from dross, dross sensitivity mattered much less.  Gilgamesh suspected that he had to concentrate to metasense the details, even at close range.

John Doe was ravenous.  Gilgamesh thought he ate as much as Tiamat.  Maybe more.  Like a Crow, he appeared to be able to eat nearly anything.

The new Beast Man hurt, despite the fact his transformation now appeared to be finished.  He had numerous phantom pains, his joints and muscles ached, his skin itched, and he had sharp stabbing pains when he breathed.  About twenty minutes after Gilgamesh arrived, John developed a nervous tick in his right arm, and it twitched sporadically.  The tick disappeared after about ten minutes.

John eventually spoke of his first feeding.  He hadn’t metasensed anything until the Crow shot himself.  He asked Gilgamesh if he sensed anything beforehand, but Gilgamesh denied doing so, fearful that John would decide to make Gilgamesh his next dross meal.

When John sensed the explosion of dross around the hapless Crow, he went toward it, instinctively.  When he found the Crow’s remains, he drew as much of the mess down as he could.  He still craved; Gilgamesh guessed John had already used two thirds of what he got from the dead Crow, an incredible burn rate, most probably used to finish his transformation.

John appeared to run about the same fundamental juice count as Tiamat, which was huge, far more than any other Transform.  He also appeared to be using juice at about the same rate Tiamat did, but Gilgamesh couldn’t tell for sure.  On the other hand, he didn’t go unconscious as Tiamat had when she drew juice.  He also took several minutes to take his juice.  Perhaps that was the difference.

The juice draw strongly affected him: he had gotten drunk on what he drew, his reason and inhibitions diminished.

John worried about where he was going to get more.  “What I took isn
’t juice or dross, Gilgamesh.  It’s something else.  Call it ‘life’.  ‘Mush’.  ‘Super-dross’.”

Gilgamesh remembered a Monster he
had metasensed as he rode through Tennessee on a train.  He barely had more than a glimpse, enough to realize the Monster used dross-tainted juice.  Gilgamesh couldn’t take the stuff, because he couldn’t take the juice with the dross.  Tiamat couldn’t take the dross-tainted juice either, because she couldn’t take the dross with the juice.  However, Monster dross-tainted juice would probably be just right for John.

Monsters were prey to a Beast Man, just as Thomas the Dreamer suspected.

Gilgamesh told John about Monsters, but not about Occum or Thomas the Dreamer.

Mid-way through their discussion, John suggested that they could go out and rob a bank.  Since he was already illegal because of the rape, he figured he might as well do something exciting.

Gilgamesh begged off.

John next suggested they go kidnap a Transform, to use for their experiments.

Gilgamesh begged off again.

John sank back into despondency, and made worried comments about the changes in his body and mind.  Gilgamesh couldn’t get much out of him regarding the changes in his mind.  John appeared embarrassed.

After an hour, Gilgamesh decided he had discovered as much as he was likely to in a short time, as much as his nerves could stand.  He started to angle for an excuse to leave.

“I’m not cold any more.  Did you know that?” John Doe said, as he scratched his ribs. “This fur is going to keep me toasty warm.”  He stared into space, glum.  Silently Gilgamesh watched.

“I came up with a name,” John Doe said, a couple minutes later.  “It’s Enkidu.  Do you recognize the reference?  You ought to.”

Gilgamesh nodded.

“Enkidu.  Gilgamesh’s companion.  You remember,” Enkidu said.  “He was the Beast Man who Gilgamesh civilized.  A good name for someone who’s more beast than man.  You like?  Are you going to help me stay civilized?  I would like you to.  It feels right.”

Gilgamesh didn’t answer.  He didn’t have a clue how to keep a Beast Man civilized and he didn’t want to aim Enkidu at other Crows who might
know more.  Occum had sounded like one of a kind.

“Why don’t you lie down and get some rest,” Gilgamesh said, changing the subject. “I’ll go out and get us some food.”

Enkidu sat back down on the mattress.  He turned away when Gilgamesh said this.

“You’re leaving me, aren’t you.”  A statement, not a question.

Gilgamesh’s heart pounded as he eyed the distance to the door, wondering if he could make it if Enkidu decided to go after him.  He didn’t answer the question.

Enkidu didn’t turn from watching the windowsill.

“I understand,” he said. “I’m a Monster.  You were good to come back at all.”

Enkidu, with his fur and piebald skin, turned back to Gilgamesh then, watching him with hollow eyes. “Good-bye.”

Gilgamesh backed toward the door.

“Good-bye,” Enkidu said, a shout. “Get out of here!  I’m a Monster.  I’m dangerous.  Get out of here, God dammit!”

Gilgamesh fled.

“Master, I beseech you,” Enkidu said.  He had a hard time keeping his mind wrapped around the concept of ‘careful’, which Wandering Shade demanded.  He didn’t want to be careful, he wanted to rip and tear.  “Help us find and kill those Arms.  Now, please.  They deserve to die for the harm they did to us.  The harm they did to you.”

Wandering Shade sat on a stump outside the cabin on Blue Ouachita Mountain.  The cabin’s former inhabitants lay deep under a pile of rocks, a thousand feet away, buried only after Enkidu’s Master gave the Hunters a new Law: no more eating humans, punishment for their Philadelphia failure.  The new Law irked Enkidu, but not as much as it irked Grendel.

Enkidu metasensed the older Hunter fighting the Law.  Enkidu suspected nothing good could come of that.

“It’s too early,” the Shade said.  “I’m not ready to show my power.  We’re not ready.  We’ll all be destroyed.”

“We can take the two Arms,” Enkidu said.  “They’re
women
!”

“You heard about their attack on your Pennsylvania camp, Enkidu,” the Wandering Shade said.  “Isn’t that enough to convince you
they’re like the Focus bitches? They work together intelligently.”  He paused, took his Police Officer cap off his head and laid it in his lap.  “I’m sorry, but I need at least another six months before I can arrange the proper law enforcement support for us.  Few of my contacts and people who say ‘yes’ to me live east of the Mississippi valley.”

Enkidu paced
the sloping ground in front of the cabin.  Grendel followed him with his eyes from his prone position twenty feet back from Wandering Shade, still wounded from the fight with the Arms.

“I know where the Arms lair,” Enkidu said.  “Only I.”  He had been skulking around the Trenton, Philadelphia and Wilmington area, checking Focus and Arm scents, when their camp had been hit.  Grendel pissed Enkidu off.  Not only did he leave the Arms alive, he had become beaten down, unable to argue with the Master or even stand on his own two feet anymore.  He whined about not enough élan, but he had just as much as Enkidu and Enkidu didn’t have any problems keeping his wolf-man shape.