Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (40 page)

Enkidu got up and walked over to him, snarling and flexing his muscles along the way.  The world swam around Gilgamesh, terror mixing with low juice.  Tolstoy tried to shrink away, but didn’t get far.  One thing hadn’t changed: Enkidu remained as excitable as he had been as a new Beast Man.

“You two have been good,” Enkidu said. “You’ve given us all the information we’ve asked for.  You want a turn at her?”

Gilgamesh’s heart stopped for a second and he barely stopped himself from gagging.  But not here, not now.  He glanced involuntarily over at Jodie’s naked corpse.

“No, thank you,” he said, at a whisper.  Tolstoy shook his head in terror, unable to do anything else.

Enkidu studied Jodie’s corpse judiciously.  Blood soaked her long bottle blond hair, and her limbs bent at strange angles from unhealed breaks.

“Yah, you’re right, not much sex appeal there,” Enkidu said.  He turned his eyes to Gilgamesh, who looked back, if only because he was too frightened to look away.  “Giving you to one of my Gals would be a much better reward.”  Tolstoy shivered against his side.  Gilgamesh turned away.

“You ever going to get over being scared, Gilgamesh?” Enkidu asked.  Gilgamesh shivered at Enkidu’s words.  “You’re practically a father to me,” Enkidu said.  “Without your help I wouldn’t have survived my transformation.  I’m not going to hurt you unless you disobey me.  If we need élan in an emergency, we’ll kill the other one.”  Tolstoy twitched and let out a quiet gasping shriek before slumping into peaceful unconsciousness, free at last from the terror.

Enkidu ignored Tolstoy.  “I know you’re short on juice, but that’s to keep us Hunters safe from your Crow tricks.”  Gilgamesh wondered what ‘Crow tricks’ Enkidu might mean.  A moment later, he shivered in terror as he finally realized that Enkidu knew enough about Crows to be wary.  How did Enkidu know?  “You’ve got food and water – not counting Jodie, of course – and a promise from me.  If I can keep ol’ Grendel from making any more ‘mistakes’, once this is over I’ve convinced my Master to reveal himself to you and give you a chance to join him.”  Enkidu smiled a wolf’s smile.  “I think you’d better listen to his spiel and take him up on his offer, if you catch my drift.”

Gilgamesh didn’t know what to say.  He found it hard to believe in Enkidu’s ‘Master’, or any sort of eventual freedom.  Yet Enkidu clearly demanded a response.

“What about Wire?” Gilgamesh said, his voice low and shaking.

“Wire?  Who?  Oh, you mean the other Crow.  Yeah, Grendel screwed up with him.  We really expected you guys to give us trouble.  Crows are powerful.  We figured we would need to kill one of you to show the others we meant business.  Not you or Wire, though.  I wanted you and my Master wanted Wire.”

How stupid.  Wire, dead because Grendel killed the wrong one of them.  Because Enkidu thought Crows were powerful.  How utterly, completely stupid.  They didn’t know Wire.  They didn’t care who they killed, and they never would.  Wretched, useless waste.  Enkidu sat with uncaring ease on his steel drum, and Gilgamesh wished someone would kill Enkidu with the same casual indifference.

Enkidu continued talking.  “Grendel’s none too happy with the Master’s Laws, so he fights back,” he said, conspiratorial.  “He used to be smart, but because he fights the Law, he’s deteriorating.  His Beast’s becoming ascendant.  You probably wouldn’t believe it, but Grendel used to teach physics at some university.”

Gilgamesh didn’t respond, but Enkidu didn’t care.

Enkidu shook his head.
“The Law is my Master’s gift to us, and it’s a wonder.  It gives us discipline, teaches us to obey, and preserves our minds from Beastly decline.”

Gilgamesh just stared.  This business about discipline and obeying sounded like somebody’s justification for claiming authority
he wasn’t entitled to.  Just what the world needed: some idiot Major Transform with enslaved Beast Men soldiers.

“I wonder if the solution to the problem of the Arms is the Law,” Enkidu said.  “If anybody needs the Law, they do.  The Law would give them back some of their lost brains when it brought them into line.”

Gilgamesh couldn’t resist.  “You think the Arms have lost their intelligence?”

“Grendel fought them and they didn’t say a word.  They let their Beasts take control, just like any of us Transform predators who are outside the Law.  It doesn’t matter anyway. 
They killed our Gals, so they have to die.  The Master’s given them to us.”  The Beast Men believed the old fallacy of Arms’ limited intelligence!  Even after everything Gilgamesh and the other Crows had told them.  Well, Gilgamesh wasn’t about to argue the point.

“See, the Master takes care of us.  I take care of Grendel, just like I can take care of you.  I take care of people who do things for me.  It’s
responsibility.
  Responsibility is important to a Hunter,” Enkidu said.  “Don’t worry so much.  I’m not crazy like Grendel.

“You’re sure you don’t want some of that ass?” he asked, nodding at Jodie’s corpse.
“You haven’t had any since you’ve been here.  I don’t mind sharing.”

Gilgamesh closed his eyes and turned away.  His greatest desire in the whole world at that moment was for someone to rescue him.  Occum and his two Beast Men.  The Arms.  Shadow.  Somebody, anybody.

Likely nobody.  Nobody cared about Crows.

The Transform was beautiful, a man running a grocery store near the center of Washington DC, all alone, ready to close up shop for the night.  I pulled my gun on him and he came quietly.  It had been exactly one week since I grabbed my last prey in Baltimore and I hadn’t used enough juice to give me the juice jitters when I took the guy.  Keaton had been out most of the week, her latest preoccupation a Chimera sighting I relayed to her from Zielinski.  She had traced the Chimera back to an abandoned camp in the Blue Mountains near Reading before losing the trail.

Me?  I bought a hearse and decided to collect Clinic kills for practice.  Unfortunately, I soon realized all the Transform Clinics within a one-day drive of Philadelphia were overstocked with guards.  The damned Chimeras must have been raiding the Clinics for juice.  That was worth several extended curses.  The last thing I wanted was the male competition interfering with my graduation test.

The hearse was my latest idea to keep my kill from becoming mine.  I tied up and gagged my kill, tossed him in the
back of the hearse, all lined with plastic sheeting, torched the grocery store, and drove off.  Nobody noticed.

The hearse didn’t completely do the trick; my kill’s juice sucked at my mind, a cool pool on a hot day.  I fought off the urge to dive in that cool pool and drove, sticking to the back roads, stopping frequently amid the cow pastures to exercise the bad chemicals out of my blood and wrestle with my mind.  The grazing cattle looked at me curiously, dismissed me and went back to grazing.  I felt eyeballs on me every time I stopped, though.  Farmers.

I found the solitude I needed for my next test after a twenty-five minute drive, on a near-abandoned river-edge tree-lined corrugated excuse for a dirt road.  No tire tracks since last night.  I temporarily abandoned the hearse and walked away, one of the more difficult things I have ever done.  I couldn’t back off out of metasense range, though the juice monkey weakened the farther I walked away.

I managed without the pain until my kill’s tendrils wrapped themselves around my mind.  Time for the flensing knife; I refused to give in.  I needed to master my juice lust.  I couldn’t give in and take the wonderful, ecstatic, heavenly juice I had earned and wanted so badly.  Keaton’s graduation test wasn’t the only reason I tortured myself this way.  If I couldn’t learn to master my juice lust, some day when my juice was high enough that taking another Transform would take me into Monster, I would take the juice and become a Monster.  The Arm instincts, um, sucked.  I had learned that when I accidentally drew from the new Monster lady.

Remember the torture, I told myself.  Remember the knife and the pain and the horrible days on the rack. Remember the beatings and the torment and the humiliation.  Remember how much I wanted freedom.

Be strong.

After two hours of cooling my heels I couldn’t stand it anymore.  I went back to the hearse and drove off.

This time I accumulated forty-two minutes of drive time before he became
mine
.

Failure?  Not in the slightest.  Forty-two minutes of drive time and two hours of distant metasensing time would be enough for me to graduate if I used my recruiting and organizational talents to get help.

Hours later, I buried the man in a hidden graveyard northwest of Philly I used at times for body disposal.  My self-inflicted pain had vanished when I took his juice.  Now, I had to set everything up for real.  Make all my preparations.  Organize the crew who would transport my kill to within a half hour of Keaton’s warehouse.  Say goodbye to the people and places I loved.  Tell Bobby to be prepared to leave in an instant.  Him I would take with me.  The rest of my recruits I would strip of their every penny and scatter to the wind.  I couldn’t move them all.  Too large a security risk.

First, though, I prayed thanksgiving to God and Jesus for showing me mercy and allotting me the time to right myself from the abyss
from where I had fallen.  Then I prayed for more mercy and more time.  I knew I would need it.

“Pan Am to London and Lufthansa to Munich,” Zielinski said.

“Cool,” Einstein said.  He looked like one of the Beatles, or at least a thirteen-year-old version thereof.  Bright, full of questions, and more than willing to haul Zielinski’s luggage around.  “Don’t Arms scare you?” Einstein asked.

“Einstein!”  Lori said, turning from where she chatted with one of her entourage.  Six, today, counting Einstein and Nancy, both non-Transform adolescents.  One of the household rules at Inferno, Lori’s household, was ‘involve the teens, treat them as adults’.  Instead of generation gap problems like the news weeklies kept yapping about, the Inferno teens were always underfoot and quite cooperative.  Einstein was the chatty one.  Nancy didn’t say a thing, but paid very close attention to every word spoken.

“No problem,” Zielinski said to Lori.  To Einstein: “Yes.  Yes they do.  It’s my calling, though.  I’ve dealt with nearly every Arm in the United States.”  Up ahead, he spotted the gate for his flight.  For the tenth time, he patted his interior suit coat pocket to make sure he still had his passport.

“The Focus thinks you’re taking too much of a risk seeing this German Arm,” Einstein said.  “I think it’s neat,” he continued, to Lori and Ann’s mute horror.  Ann Chiron was Einstein’s mother as well as being the household anthropologist.  “The Germans even give her Transforms who can’t find homes, to put them out of their misery.  Officially, even.  Mom and the other Inferno Transforms freak out whenever anyone even thinks about
that
.”

Interesting.  Men and women Transforms treated Zielinski with extreme reticence and only spoke to him about Transform issues on the rarest occasions.  He had thought their reticence came from the fact he dealt with Focuses…but did their problem come from the fact he dealt with Arms?  An instinct, perhaps, since Arms preyed on Transforms?  What sort of stories did the Transforms tell about him, and the Arms, when he wasn’t around?

“I’m sorry, Henry,” Lori said, giving Einstein a killer glare.  The teen didn’t seem fazed by his Focus’s annoyance.

“What sort of risk do you think I’m taking, not counting the note?” Zielinski said, referring to a warning note of three days previous, addressed to Lori.  Ann dragged Einstein aside and said a few quiet words to him, and the teen shrugged.

“Eissler’s an Arm.  I can’t imagine going to meet a mature Arm on her turf, without any protection.  Too risky for my taste.  I wasn’t going to say anything, though, because it’s your call.  Until blabbermouth here brought it up.”

Zielinski smiled.  “When dealing with Arms as a normal, you can’t think in terms of dominance or physical protection.  You can’t avoid being afraid.  Realistically, though, a mature Arm is no more fearsome than a well-armed soldier, no more likely to act irrationally than a soldier coming out of a firefight.  Without my army medical experience, dealing with any of the Major Transforms would be much more difficult.”  He walked with an extra bounce in his step today, because Carol had phoned him with the good news.  She had transported one of her ‘kills’, as she termed them, for forty-two minutes without the
untagged Transform becoming hers and forcing her to take its juice.  Success!  As soon as he reached Europe, she would hunt down a Transform and graduate.

“You fought in ‘Nam?” Einstein said, after wiggling out of his mother’s grasp.  Following some juice-aided communication from Lori, Ann turned her back on them in embarrassment, going back to bodyguard duties the sedentary Transform couldn’t possibly be qualified for.  Necessary, though, as at least a dozen fellow passengers watched Lori and her entourage with awe, and in two cases, hostility.

“Korea.  Not fought.  Served as an MD.”

“Neato, Dr. Zielinski.  Ever see anyone get shot?”

He nodded and didn’t go into details.  Some things weren’t appropriate to discuss with children.