Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (38 page)

Enkidu bent his huge fur covered form down and, without lifting his foot from Gilgamesh’s back, pulled the Crow’s arms behind him and tied them at the wrist with a thick rope.  Enkidu’s claws cut deep gouges in Gilgamesh’s forearms as he did so.  Then he flipped Gilgamesh over, and for the first time, Gilgamesh looked into the transformed eyes of Enkidu, the John Doe he had rescued so many months ago in Chicago.

Fur covered Enkidu now, turning him into a brown and white Beast Man, a foot and a half taller than Gilgamesh, and at least twice his weight.  He wore nothing but a wide pouch, belted around his waist.  A muzzle ornamented his face, and his lips covered fangs.  His wide-set animal eyes, large and brown, were merciless.

Focus Hera and her patrol inched forward, at a walk so slow they would take two hours to reach his position.  By then, Gilgamesh knew he would be dead.

Ahead of him, Gilgamesh metasensed the other Beast Man, still chasing Wire.  The Guru-in-training drove his car erratically and flung strange dross things at the Beast Man, to no noticeable effect.  Gilgamesh
had thought Wire would be safe once he made it to his car, but the Beast Man hadn’t given up the chase.  In fact, with the Schuylkill at his back, the Beast Man had an angle on him.  To Gilgamesh’s horror, the Beast Man, a low lizard-thing, put on a sudden burst of speed, reached out and slashed at Wire’s car.  His car spun out and slowed.  The Beast had taken out one of Wire’s tires.  In a moment, the Beast got a second tire.

A moment after that, the Beast jumped through the windshield of Wire’s car and grabbed Wire.

Enkidu roared again and yanked Gilgamesh forward to pick him up.  That pain was the last thing Gilgamesh sensed before he passed out.

Part 4
A Dance of Hearts and Minds, with Knives

"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail,

"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail!

See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance:

They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?"

– Lewis Carroll

An Arm is perfectly capable of carrying a grudge forever.  Arms do not live ‘for the moment’ – everything they are is a product of everything they have been before, and everything that has happened to them before.

“The Book of Arms”

Gilgamesh awoke to the sound of two low voices, chanting.  He moaned, overcome by a craving for dross, an overpowering craving, the worst he could remember.  T
he memories came flooding back to him: warnings of danger, Crows fleeing, the frantic race across town with Enkidu on his tail.  He panicked and tried to run, but he couldn’t even move.  More panic.

He hurt.  He felt like he had been beaten to a pulp.

He couldn’t remember the end of the chase.  Gilgamesh let the panic run through him until, panic exhausted, he regained control.  He slowly tried to open his eyes.  Only one would open, and not easily, crusted over by blood.

Concrete floor, mere inches from his eye.  Blood spackled the floor around him, dried, not fresh.  His blood.  The farther from him, the fewer spatters.

He metasensed two Crows and two Beast Men near him.  Not too far away, perhaps a third of a mile, Tiamat fixed breakfast and the Skinner exercised in the Arms’ lair.  The Beast Men’s lair was right on top of the Arms!

Across the Schuylkill River, Focus Hera and her guards walked slowly through downtown Philadelphia, on another patrol.  The other two Crow captives were Wire and Tolstoy.  Sinclair must have gotten away.

His worst pain was in his legs.  They throbbed.  He panicked even worse for a moment when he realized he couldn’t feel his feet.  When he realized he couldn’t do anything about the lack of sensation, he calmed back down.

Gilgamesh figured from the hollow echoes he was in a large space.  The room had a musty smell, as if the air hadn’t moved in a long time.  When he placed himself by the position of the Skinner’s warehouse, he realized he was in a nearby abandoned warehouse.  No one ever visited this place, and he doubted anyone would notice the Beasts’ presence.  The warehouse ceiling was at least twenty feet over his head, the area around them large and open.  To the left he picked out a metal fire-escape style stairway going up to a balcony or second floor.  To the right there were four filthy narrow windows lined with metal gratings, and a door down a short set of stairs that likely descended to street level.  Dust and old trash covered the floor.  The Beast Men smelled like river water.

Across from him, the Beast Men finished their chanting.  Enkidu reared back on his hind legs, immense with his animal bulk.  Then Enkidu
stretched
, all seven feet and three hundred plus pounds of bone and muscle.

“Fuck,” Enkidu said, a deep bass rumble.  Gilgamesh froze, surprised a beast like Enkidu could still speak.  Enkidu wore nothing but his brown and white piebald fur.
The fur was short and coarse, except on his animal head, under his armpits, and around his genitals, where it was longer and shaggy.  A grossly oversized human penis hung from his crotch, an abomination.  Enkidu’s atrocity of a face elongated into a short muzzle.  Large canine teeth showed when he opened his mouth.  His eyes, set wider than human eyes, looked sideways as well as forward.  His arms reminded Gilgamesh of legs, and his hands were wide, with short fingers, almost like paws.  Enkidu’s long vicious claws did not appear to retract.

The second Beast Man was more lizard than mammal, only slightly smaller th
an Enkidu.  Smooth gray-green scaly skin covered him, from his unnatural wide mouth to his stubby tail.  He too had lost most of his humanity, save for an absurd looking oversized penis hanging between his legs and the strange human-looking ears on his lizard face.

“Fuck,” Enkidu said again, still stretching upright.

Something in Enkidu’s hips shifted position, and then shifted again.  Swearing and quoting from some nonsense Enkidu termed the Law, Enkidu slowly changed the shape of his midsection from quadruped animal to bipedal human.  The speed of Enkidu’s change shocked Gilgamesh.  He never imagined anything living could change itself so much, so quickly.  Still, it took a half hour for Enkidu to finish his change, and when he finished, he hadn’t changed his size or his mass, just the architecture of his hips.  He might walk like a man now, but he retained his claws, fur and his muzzle.  He took a piece of old sheet and tied it around his waist, and then, a trick of the eye due to the clothes, he appeared almost civilized.

Terror filled Gilgamesh again and he had to shut his working eye.  Enkidu was a werewolf!  If you stripped off the fictional properties of ‘full moon’ and ‘near instant shape shifting’, what remained was what Enkidu had done, both horrific and awesome.

Gilgamesh blamed himself.  Without his help, Enkidu would have died during his initial transformation.

“Your turn,” Enkidu said.  Gilgamesh couldn’t force himself to open his eye to record whatever horror came next.

“It hurtssss,” the other Beast Man said, a whiny whispering hiss.

“Do it,” Enkidu said.
“Follow the Law.”

Gilgamesh heard the other beast move away.  “Fuck, Grendel, you can’t leave yourself in your combat form,” Enkidu said.  “Our Master will have your hide.”

“Hssss.  I need more food.  More élan.  I want our Galssss.”

“We can’t keep our Gals anywhere near those damned Arms or they’ll kill them,” Enkidu said.  “They can sense our Gals but not us, remember?  Our Master will guard them during the day and we’ll go back to them tonight.”

Heavy paces approached Gilgamesh and he heard Enkidu’s heavy breathing above him.  Suddenly, something scraped across Gilgamesh’s chest and drew blood.  Gilgamesh squawked in panic and tried to move, but managed nothing more than a wiggle.

“You might as well stop pretending to be unconscious, Gilgamesh,” Enkidu said.  “All three of you, in fact.”

Resigned to his fate, Gilgamesh opened his working eye.  Wire and Tolstoy shifted positions beside him.  Grendel, the lizard Beast Man, uncurled himself from the far wall where he had gone to avoid Enkidu’s ire and stood on his four legs.  He gave the Crows a hungry look as he walked over to them.

“They were pretending!” Grendel said, sounding surprised and offended.  Enkidu ignored him.

Gilgamesh didn’t answer.  Neither did Wire and Tolstoy.

“Let me tell you how it’s going to be,” Enkidu said.  He folded his arms across his broad chest and sneered down at Gilgamesh.
“We’re hunting Arms.  They killed our Gals, so they need to die.”

“Die, yeah, die,” Grendel cut in, hissing, in a sort-of sing song voice.
“We’re going to cut them into little tiny piecesesss and eat the piecesesss while they watch.  Fuck them til they’re spa-ssplit down the middle.”

“Shut up, Grendel,” Enkidu said.
“This is business.”

“Kill them.  Cut their heartss out.  Cut them into little piecessss.”

Enkidu spoke over Grendel’s bloodthirsty background murmuring. “We’re going to kill both of them. We’re going to wait until one of them kills.  We’ll both kill the one while she’s unconscious.  Then we’ll go after the other, two against one, and kill her too.”

“Eat the piecessss while the
y sssstill live.  Fuck them right up the middle,” Grendel continued.

Gilgamesh said nothing and neither did the other Crows.  He appreciated the level heads of the other Crows.  They all knew terror.  Not a one of them allowed the panic to make
him stupid.

“You’re going to help us,” Enkidu said to the Crows.  “We want information.  I want to know everything you three have learned about them while you’ve watched them. 
You can metasense them.  You know all about them.  Tell me and I’ll let you live.”  Enkidu paused and prodded Gilgamesh with his foot.  The prod rocked Gilgamesh’s body back and forth, the pain a summons of tears to his eyes.  To his surprise, Gilgamesh’s second eye sprung open, vision blurry.  He realized his eye had been welded shut by dried blood.

“Tonight, you three will be on watch.  You won’t be able to escape and the goddamned Arms and Focuses can’t metasense either you Crows or us Hunters worth shit, if at all.  If any of you give me any trouble, I’ll kill you.”  Enkidu smiled a dangerous and hungry smile.  “I only need one of you.”

Enkidu scanned the three of them, all lined up in a row on the floor.  “You going to tell me what I want to know?”  Enkidu said, his voice even deeper, and his claws now curled in front of him.

Gilgamesh moved his head, still dizzy from the fight
, and located Tolstoy and Wire.  Both he and Tolstoy fixed their gaze on Wire, looking for guidance.  Wire was pale.

Grendel padded over to Wire, noseless face almost at Wire’s chest.

“Wh-what do you want to know?” Wire forced out in a whisper, voice not quite steady.

“Ansssswers!” Grendel roared.  He slashed forward with his claws, at and through Wire’s neck, nearly decapitating the Crow.  Chunks of flesh flew across the room and blood spurted in a fountain.

Wire died with an explosion of dross and juice that filled the room, covering everything, saturating and pervading.  Grendel laughed a hissing laugh and drew from the mess.  Enkidu swore, “God damn it, Grendel!  Our Master wanted that one in specific!” and then he, too, drew.

Gilgamesh, in stark terror, tried to sick up dross, but he didn’t have any to sick up.  Instead, he sank into the black pit of unconsciousness.

“No.  You stay away from Gal 3,” Wandering Shade said, his face dark with anger.  Grendel bowed his head almost to the floor of the ranger’s cabin, their new home away from home in Ridley Creek State Park.  Although only fifteen miles from the warehouse district and their captive Crows, the park was vacant enough for their purposes.  Especially after their Master proved to be able to disguise himself as the park ranger.  The nameless park ranger now lived in the basement with the more recalcitrant of their Gals and Zombies.

“Why, Masssster?” Grendel said.  “She’sss about to go over.”

“We’ll let Enkidu take her,” Wandering Shade said.  “This is punishment for your mistakes, Grendel.  For killing the Crow Wire.”

Grendel was a fool.

“Enkidu, what’s with those other things you’re keeping in the basement,” Wandering Shade said.  “They’re male Transforms in withdrawal, aren’t they?”  Enkidu nodded.  He used the park ranger’s recliner for his seat and ate raw pork from a bucket.  They had knocked over a butcher shop in Valley Forge three days ago, and a little of their haul remained.  “They don’t feel right.”

“Master, I’ve been experimenting again,” Enkidu said, and burped.  Transform Sickness and its products was too fruitful a playground of power to ignore.

“He’ssss a real Abraham Eissssenstein, Massster,” Grendel said.

Enkidu ignored him.  “We can hunt down male Transforms as easily as we can hunt women Transforms, and I decided to figure out if I could make use of them.”  His experiments showed promise.  Two of his Gals he had made special, able to be kept forever, bound with the Law.  Neither Gal talked, unlike Grendel’s three best.  T
he tie to the Law and to him made them good in the sack, though.  There was nothing like a willing lover to make a day shine.