Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (34 page)

“I learned of their location as well,” the Wandering Shade said, his voice sad.  “They’re in Philadelphia proper, a city crawling with Focuses and Crows.  Alas, I can’t keep you hidden there, not until I put together some new tricks.  Give me another four months of work and I’ll be able to keep you hidden, even in daylight.”

“Then don’t bother to keep us hidden,” Enkidu said
, waving his arms in frustration.  “We’re terrifying predators.  Let us terrify.  You are…whatever you are.  The unique Master of the Law.  Keep yourself hidden to do your tricks and let us do the dangerous work.  It’s time we Hunters showed
our
power.”

It was time for their enemies to
bleed
.  Time for a real fight.  He hadn’t given himself to the Law to avoid fights.

“I’ll make a deal,” Wandering Shade said.  “So far, I
’ve allowed the Law I gave you to take its course, allowing you to find your own way.  The two of you call me ‘Master’, but I’m not your commander.  I’ll lead you to the Arm’s lair and give you your revenge, but only if you agree to follow my orders as your Legal commander.”

“Why, Master?” Enkidu asked.  “We should lead.  We’re
Hunters
.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” the Wandering Shade said.  “But this part of the country is crawling with Major Transforms.  You can’t hunt and kill them all; the damned Focus bitches would see to that.  I
must
be in command.  Only I possess the necessary experience to guide you.”

“Will we still get to fight, Master?” Enkidu asked.

“Absolutely,” the Wandering Shade said.  “There will be fighting, and the fighting will be your job.”

Enkidu looked at Grendel, and motioned for him to stand.  Grendel did, albeit on four legs.

“I’m in,” Enkidu said.  “Make it Legal.”

“I assss well,” Grendel said.  “The Arm bitchesss mussst die!”

The Wandering Shade waved his hands and a map appeared in the evening air.  Enkidu smiled at their Master’s power, glad to have someone like him on their side.  Poor Grendel shrank back in ball-clenching terror, terrified as always of anything new.  Enkidu wondered if Grendel was part Crow.  “You may know where the Arms lair in Philadelphia, but you don’t know where the Focuses and Crows live,” the Wandering Shade said.  Lights appeared on his map, a picture of a Focus or Crow by each dot.

“Gilgamesh!” Enkidu said.  The Crow who helped him through his transformation lived in Philadelphia!  A wide grin raced across his wolf-face.

“Yes, your maker.  He’s not the important one, though.  This one is,” the Wandering Shade said, and pointed to a tall, blonde and imposing Crow.  “Bring
that
troublemaker to
me
.  He’ll either join the Hunter Empire or
die
.”

Enkidu howled in pleasure.  This sounded like fun.  Lots of fun.

Zielinski sat in a chair in his living room, staring at the wall, too fatigued to stand, but not tired enough to sleep.  He ignored the pile of dirty dishes next to his chair and the stack of newspapers strewn about the floor.  After lunch, he had called his five closest local Focus contacts.  Four had hung up on him and Focus Rizzari was ‘unavailable’.  He couldn’t even get through to Focus Ackermann, his usual Focus confidant.  Her Transforms wouldn’t let him talk to her, screening her calls.

He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights after he got back this morning from his plane flight.

“Jesus, what a mess!”

Zielinski looked up to see Carol Hancock striding across the room, an Amazon goddess with a mad on.

“We need to talk,” she said.  Her voice was deep and nasty, her posture filled with what she termed the predator effect.  He guessed he should be quivering in fear or something equivalent.

Zielinski turned away, unwilling to play.
“I can’t help you today,” he said, tears beading at the corners of his eyes.  “I fucked up and killed a Focus.”

“Your problem.  Which one?”
Carol held as much contempt in her cold and threatening voice as all the Focuses he had talked to since the event, put together.  Oh, right.  Arms don’t do sympathy.

Zielinski turned back to Carol, a grimace on his face.  Still under Keaton’s thumb until Keaton killed her, yet another failure of his.  His whole life was nothing but one failure after another.

“Karen Forsythe,” he said.  “She had cancer, which is different in Major Transforms.  The cancer didn’t attack her organs the way a normal metastasized cancer would, it attacked her soft tissues.  She had been operated on over thirty times, none by me, and everyone thought this was just another operation.”

“What happened?”  Demanding.  Arms were so demanding.

“I missed the signs when she started raving, thinking her insanity was some sort of juice problem.  Instead, the problem came from a tumor pressing on her brain, rapidly growing in the meninges.  The tumor caused unbelievable juice flows, confusing all of us.  We had five Focuses retagging Transforms like mad, Transforms nearly going Monster or into withdrawal, and suddenly, Karen’s head exploded on us.  Her brains came out her eyes.”

Carol sucked her breath in and did not speak.  Her control had markedly improved if that was the only reaction his little bombshell elicited.

“None of us itinerants had ever before lost a Focus.  Now, because the unexpected happened, they’re blaming me.”  He turned away from Carol, resigned to some atrocious strong-arm tactics.  “I can’t help you anymore.”

“I’m not interested
in who set you up to fail today, Zielinski.  I came here for information and I expect you to provide.”

Set him up?  Was Carol right?  He hadn’t worked on Forsythe before.  Hell, a setup was possible, and he did have ample enemies.

Unhappy it took an Arm to point out the obvious to him, he said: “Oh go fuck yourself!  Kill another dozen…”  If he got lucky, Hancock would lose her cool and kill him quickly.  Put him out of his misery.

“Tough luck, Hank ol’ boy,” Carol said.
“I understand you’re all fucked up in the head.  You’re carrying enough smelly bad juice to make
me
itch.  I just don’t care.”

Zielinski paused for a moment, sure Carol readied to slice off his head.  Nothing happened.  He looked back at Carol, who hadn’t even moved after he challenged her.  Okay.  What did he need to do to set Carol off, anyway?

“Let me tell you a story,” Carol said.  “I want to know what the fuck is going on.”

Carol didn’t sit, but paced as she told him a story about her and Keaton attacking a Chimera and its harem.  An unsuccessful attack.

“So what do you want me to tell you about this?” he asked, his curiosity barely awake.  He forced himself to look up at Hancock.  “Focus Biggioni hired you to do this, didn’t she?”

Carol sat down in the chair beside his, and sighed.  “I don’t even know why I fucking bother,” she said, exasperated.  “Months of practice at ‘stone face’ and you can still read me like a book.”

“To tell the truth, I can’t read you at all today, save what you’re trying to project,” Zielinski said.  “However, I understand Arms, I understand the Network and I understand Biggioni.”

Glare.  “Fine.  Tell me what you’ve found out about Chimeras recently.  Keaton and I want to know.”

He looked around the room with quick furtive glances, panicked, heart racing.  No, Keaton wasn’t here.  Her presence would have been too much to take, on top of everything else.  She would
snicker
at him.  He would have to slit his own throat.

“Absolutely nothing I haven’t already told you.”

Carol tapped an impatient forefinger on the arm of her chair.  “Chimeras must be rare. There’ve been a couple hundred Focus transformations, yet we only know of three verified Chimeras, the one we ran into, the corpse and the one you encountered in Boston.  Four if you count the scent of the Chimera we didn’t see.  What are the odds the Chimeras would come here, right next to us Arms?”

“They need juice, Carol.  Just like you.  More Transforms, in raw numbers, not percentages, live in the Boston to Washington DC corridor than anywhere else in the country.”

“So you’re convinced they’re direct competitors?”

“You tell me.  You ran into one.”

Carol hissed and kicked over a pile of journals from where she sat.

“I have other information,” he said, slowly waking to the
task.  “For instance, you might find this article interesting.”  He tossed the May issue of the New England Journal of Medicine to Carol to read.  She snagged the magazine, speed-read the article, and tossed it out of the room.  Zielinski took a sip of coffee.

“So I’m
the Monster form of a Focus, eh?  Their big goal is to prevent a Focus from going Monster in her conversion by removing one of her female attendants.  Are they insane?”  Carol said.

“They’re deluded,” Zielinski said.  “No matter the data, they still think in terms of curing.  Note their comment about total starvation and total elimination of exercise to keep the new Arm under control long enough for, ahem, nature to take its course.”

“Withdrawal.  They’re going to be killing all the Arms who come through from now on, aren’t they?”

“I believe so.  Unless someone can find some way to do something about the situation,” Zielinski said, career change options echoing in his mind.  He had always wanted to run a gas station.  He
suspected that gas stations, if you properly trained the pump attendants for courtesy, would practically coin money.

Carol didn’t answer.  She glared at him while he sat, depressed.

He needed to fill the silence.  “We’ve made some discoveries about Focus households,” he said.

“We?”  Carol snorted in reference to his imperial ‘we’.  “Tell me.”

“Two years ago ‘we’ discovered the number of Transforms in a Focus’s household determines her juice level.  Thanks to my work with you in St. Louis, I managed to map Arm juice counts to Focus juice counts.  The average Focus household of eight triads, of twenty-four Transforms, maps out to a juice count of 110 for an Arm.”

“That’s horrible!” Carol said.  “You mean every Focus in the country is running low juice?  No wonder Keaton refers to them as ‘Focus bitches’.  Both Keaton and I fully qualify as Arm bitches at 110.”  Carol paused for a moment.  “What juice count do you consider optimal for Arms?”

“117 maps to normal human functioning,” he said.

“Nope.  125.  Anything over 125 is distracting, which makes 125 optimal,” Carol said.  He wrote down a note about Carol’s reaction.  It didn’t surprise him the Arms would want their juice as high as possible without interfering with their efforts, considering the danger of their lives.

“Uh huh,” he said.  “Very interesting.”

“So, how does a Focus get more Transforms into her household?” Carol asked.  “If your numbers are correct, a Focus household should run about a hundred people, if one assumes an optimal juice count is the deciding factor.”

“Nobody understands how to increase the size of Focus households,” Zielinski said.  “Unfortunately, I only know of one Focus, a local I recently started to work with, who’s working on solving the problem.”

“Only one?  Who is she?”

“Focus Rizzari,” he said.

“Her
again
?”  Pause.  “You’re right.  Someday I need to meet this Focus Rizzari.  Anything else new and perhaps more helpful?”

“Bradford, at the University of Miami, came up with a working classification scheme for Monsters, but of course we have no idea why his scheme works,” Zielinski said.

“Save me,” Carol said.  “Come on, you must have something more interesting than this crap.”

Zielinski
slowly levered himself out of his chair, went into his office and rummaged through the papers on his desk.  Carol followed.  “There’s a ruckus among the upstate New York Focuses.  Some Transform beat his wife to death and the court system is trying to figure out what to do with him.  If they send him to prison, his Focus would need to visit him several times a week to keep him supplied with juice.  She refuses…”

“That’s utter garbage!” Carol said, interrupting him.  “Zielinski, dammit, you’re working for me, and I want information I can use, not this crap.  For instance, have you learned anything more about the West German Arm, Eissler?”

He nodded.  “Eissler can pass as a normal woman, meaning she doesn’t have any muscle growth problems.”  Carol frowned, thinking.  “Also, Eissler doesn’t possess the food binge problem.  In fact, my contacts state she eats less than a Focus.”

“Useful,” Carol said.  “Do you think these two things are connected?”

Zielinski blinked and scratched down a note.  He hadn’t thought so, but now that Carol mentioned it, a connection did make sense.  “Perhaps.  They might be two effects based off of one trick.”

“Anything else,” Carol said.  This time, she made her comment an order, not a question.

“Eissler didn’t start out working for the West German government,” Zielinski said.  “After she transformed she was a captive of the Focuses.  She escaped and began to take household Transforms from the local Focuses for her juice.  The Focuses complained and got the German army to protect them.  Eissler had one inconclusive fight with a squad of soldiers, then began an intimidation campaign against the bureaucrats, for instance leaving boxes on their office desks with notes saying things like ‘this could have been a bomb and you could be dead, so back off.’  Her actions prompted the German bureaucrats to suggest a deal: they offered surplus Transforms to Eissler if she agreed to stop poaching on the Focuses.  She agreed, starting off their current relationship.”  He paused.  “Despite the agreement, Eissler never shows herself in public and only deals with a couple of bureaucrats she has totally buffaloed.”