Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (42 page)

She still held me.  She shook her head minutely.  “I need you here until this Chimera mess is decided.”

A meaningless and indefinite deadline.  “You taught me well, ma’am.  I learned what I needed, to survive.  I can’t stay here forever.”

She cut me off with a knife at my throat.  Dammit.  Where was her kill lust?  A perfectly good kill waited for her, and she
ignored
the free prey.

Keaton was on the stalk
, only her target was
me
, dammit!

“You meet your graduation requirements only when I say you do!  You hear me, bitch?”

“It’s a clean kill.”  Screw up her focus.  Get her focused on the kill, not on me.  “Nobody…”

She twisted her face into a snarl and pressed the knife into my neck.

I had gotten through.  Her snarl was an involuntary and honest reaction to her focusing her attention away from the kill.

“This kill is for you,” I offered, placating, soothing.  Your favorite drug, dear, just for you!

“Shut the fuck up!”

I shut.  I
had definitely gotten to her.  She wanted the kill.  Her temper and her need showed through, far more than she liked.

She watched me.  Her self-control evaporated, allowing me to read her mind as she consider
ed her options.

Huh.  I sensed an idea come to her: chain me up, take the kill, and keep me here to fight whatever fight was coming.

I wouldn’t stand for such treatment.  If she tried to chain me, she would start the biggest fight she had ever seen.  If she tried to kill me, I would put a bullet through the kill’s brain before I died.

She watched me as I declared my position without words.  Almost as if she drew a sheet over herself, she brought herself back under control.  She let me go and motioned me over to the sitting area.  She sat
, and motioned me to sit, not on the floor, but on one of the chairs.  A rare privilege.

“Let me state my case,” Keaton said.  Ah.  Logic time.  “Remember the scentless shoeprint?”

Crap.  I hadn’t considered that terrifying bit of reality.  “Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s a Major Transform trick, a trick I suspect any variety of Major Transform can learn.  Hancock, there’s an Arm and a Chimera in Canada who are about a decade old.  They possess abilities no other Transforms have.  Either might be behind the scentless shoeprint.  I once surprised a young man in Indiana who I couldn’t metasense.  He wiggled his fingers at me and did something to my metasense, making all the nearby wooden objects metasense as prey Transforms.”  She dared me to laugh.  I didn’t.  It took work.  “I also once ran afoul of a Focus in the Pittsburgh area, the reason I told you to stay out of there.  For a while, the Focus had me seeing and hearing Hell, like I had been dropped into a fucking movie of the Devil’s playground.  She missed covering my sense of smell, though, so I managed to get away.  I can’t tell my own Focus where I live because her charisma is too strong and because of her unconscious desires to make a pet out of me
, and she’s the closest thing to a friend I have in the Focus community.”  Keaton stabbed me with her eyes.  “Is this what you’re ready for, Hancock?”

I didn’t want to insult my teacher.  She had more than fulfilled her end of the bargain.

“Yes, ma’am.”  Now trained, I would risk my life for my freedom.

“I do have more things, juice tricks, that I can teach you,” Keaton said.  She showed me her knife and made it vanish.  Right before my eyes.  Then she made it reappear.  Her trick wasn’t sleight of hand.  “You still can’t
burn
.”

I nodded and took a deep breath, ready to match her logic with my own.  “I learned a lot from you, ma’am.  Probably enough to survive on my own,” I said.  “I get on your nerves too often, though.  If I stay much longer, you
will
kill me, a waste of my life and your time, ma’am, the time you spent teaching me.”

“Your one year anniversary present’s a visit with my Focus, who’s also my main Network contact.  This Focus saved my life.  This Focus holds enough political power to
order
the Focus Network to be friends with you and
support you
.”  Her predator effect turned persuasive.  I felt…tempted.

Damn.  Keaton wasn’t supposed to be able to tempt me, especially with some unnamed Focus Network contact.  She wasn’t supposed to be able to do this with her predator effect!

I understood the benefits of the damned Network, thanks to Zielinski.  This was a hell of a lot better offer than a trick to make a knife disappear.  “You’ll need help.  I did when I was far more experienced than you are,” Keaton said, still persuasive.  “The police and the FBI know far more about Arms and how to hunt them these days.  As you well know, there are Transforms who want to kill you.  You need what I can teach you!”  She paused, and I began to sweat, the merits of her argument wiggling tentacles into my soul.  “You’ll be ready to go for real in the first quarter of ’68.  You’ll be a far better Arm than you are today, if you do so.  I won’t require any additional graduation payments.”

I opened my mouth to give in…and shut it.  She had subtly moved from ‘I own you, skag’ to real negotiations.  Real temptation.  An offer to take my winnings and smile at my victory.  Her offer was achingly tempting.

However, if Keaton followed her pattern, I would need to survive at least two more of her major psychotic episodes before I left.  Despite her tempting offer, the risk was too high.  Worse, she would have to re-establish her Arm dominance over me to continue to teach me.  I didn’t want the pain.

My decision was to leave today.  I would chance the cold cruel world.

I shook my head and turned down her offer.  I filled my mind with gratitude, humbled at her offer, and silently pledged to deal with her amicably in the future.  I let her sense my decision.

On the other hand, if she didn’t give me my freedom, I would take it anyway.  If succeeding at her graduation test wasn’t enough for her, I would run for it at the first opportunity.  I let her sense this as well.

Keaton considered again, trying for a rational decision.

Ha!  The kill lying over by the squat rack would keep her from making a rational decision.

As she sat across from me and considered, her eyes drifted out of focus.  I had her.  Her eyes drifted because she used her metasense on the kill.  The kill became
hers
.

I carefully didn’t react.

Keaton took several long minutes where she tried to reason with her lust.  I didn’t move.  I barely even breathed.

“Fine,” she said, finally.  “I’ll contact you.  By telephone.  You will not contact me.”  Safe.  Intelligent.  Necessary.  “The East Coast, the West Coast and the city of Detroit are mine.”  Her permission to claim a new territory somewhere else.

The kill lust had her.

“Ma’am,” I said with a nod, and left.  I made sure I passed through the still open garage door before Keaton had any opportunity to change her decision.  I kept going for almost exactly a quarter mile.  With the kill still alive, at the edge of my range, I stopped.

The recently reinforced garage door rolled down, followed by the clang of the brand new inch thick bolt.  A few moments later, the glorious glow of the kill flickered briefly and then went out.

Keaton took him, not in an instant but in about fifteen seconds.  Afterwards, she lay down next to the kill in post draw bliss.

I was free!  After ten months with Keaton, after a year as an Arm, I was free!  I was a slave to nothing and no one.  I had what it took to survive.  I could hunt.  I could recruit normals to my control.  I could even control myself.  I was free!

I
grinned.

The blindfold was good for something.  His three days of involuntary blindness had honed his sense
s, to where his metasense almost doubled as sight.  Over at the Skinner’s warehouse, he metasensed Tiamat’s departure, and the joy in her heart.  The Skinner didn’t follow, and though he wasn’t sure how he knew, he believed the Skinner had accepted Tiamat’s gift Transform as payment for her freedom.  Tears burned his eyes in relief; Tiamat would survive the Beasts if she kept going.  In his heart, he urged her to flee as fast as she could possibly go.

Inside, the Skinner bolted the door and
pranced over to the gift Transform.  She took him in her arms and tore the juice out of him, not with the incredibly vicious speed of the uniquely fast Arm juice suck, but over fifteen seconds.  He died in her arms as she sank to the floor, overcome with post kill ecstasy.

He had never before metasensed the Skinner draw juice, and her relatively slow care surprised him.  Of course, the Skinner had been an Arm much longer than Tiamat.  He wondered whether she was as useless as Tiamat after a juice feeding.

Gilgamesh feared he had gone insane.  He had been bereft of dross, and therefore juice, for over two weeks.  Less than a half hour ago Enkidu had killed Tolstoy for his élan, as Enkidu termed it.  Gilgamesh hadn’t cried.  His tears were long gone.  Instead, he took the hot and almost inedible dross left after Enkidu and Grendel scooped up Tolstoy’s élan remains.  The two Beasts had forgotten him in their priapic battle frenzy.  Another hour and he would have enough dross to properly sick up on them!

Gilgamesh had never hated before.  Not like this.  He wanted the two Beast Men to suffer for their deeds.  If he couldn’t do it, he hoped the Arms would.

“That’s it, just as our Master predicted,” Enkidu said, metasensing the Arm’s warehouse and the Skinner’s swoon.  He bounced on his toes with excitement. “Go!  Go!”

The door slammed behind them as they charged the Skinner’s warehouse.  Grendel, stuck in his four-legged
lizard form, sped ahead of Enkidu.  Enkidu, upright, followed more slowly.

They wanted to kill the Skinner and exact their revenge.  She lay on the warehouse floor, vulnerable, and the two ‘Hunters’ aimed to surprise her and kill her.

Gilgamesh hoped they would fail.  He wanted the Skinner to wake up, see them, and tear their murdering, Crow-killing guts out.  She was terrifying and cruel, but she was smart and cunning as well.  The Beast Men were little more than beasts, dangerous and deluded.  Surely, the Skinner would be able to defeat them.

However, they were predators, too, and there were two of them.  The Skinner continued to
lie on the warehouse floor.

Grendel reached the Skinner’s warehouse in less than a minute.  He didn’t slow his charge when he reached the door, slamming the metal doorway loud enough for Gilgamesh to hear.  The door held, to Gilgamesh’s surprise.  Grendel tried the other two, but they held also.

The Skinner never moved.  Her juice wiggled, though.

Gilgamesh smiled hope and imagined taking dross from the remnants of her kill.  It had been so long since he had any Arm dross.  Arm kill dross would be wonderful compared to the dross he had been forced to take today.  Dross he still took.  Gilgamesh felt like he was about to drown in shame.

He would have to free himself, though, to get close enough to take the Arm dross.  He wiggled his bonds, but they refused to loosen.  Here he would stay.

At the Skinner’s warehouse, Grendel charged the door again, then each of the other doors in turn.
Gilgamesh thought it would probably be more effective to concentrate on only one door, but little of Grendel’s mind remained, and he didn’t think to do so.

After Enkidu arrived, he corralled Grendel and convinced him to cooperate as they charged the door together.  It took several tries, and each try took fresh convincing.  Finally, three minutes after the Skinner killed the gift Transform, they were through.

Wake up!
  Gilgamesh willed at the Skinner. 
They’re going to kill you.  Wake up!

The Skinner remained unmoving on the floor.

At that moment, Gilgamesh realized there were other things going on.  Very strange things.

“What we’re going to do is the old Monster hunt routine,” Tonya said.  “That is, we’ll be looking for non-human footprints and talking to people to see if they’ve seen anything strange in the past week, including the hearse.  I’ll be using my metasense, but don’t count on it.  A hundred yards isn’t much if a Monster charges.”

Tonya’s household effectives spread out, in pairs, to cover both sides of Lindbergh.  Everyone out with her was heavily armed, their primary weapons big game rifles.  Monster guns, as the Transforms called them.  They made one pass on Lindbergh and headed into the industrial district between Lindbergh and Essington road.  They found nothing, and headed back to Lindbergh.

Something was off.  Tonya couldn’t tell what.

She hoped her gut feeling came from the small group of mostly silent Monsters Die protesters who followed her and her household effectives.  Over three hundred of them had been marching and shouting outside of her household, but when her people piled into their vehicles they left many of the protesters behind.  However, over fifty of them managed to follow in cars, and more dribbled in every minute.