A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (3 page)

Gilgamesh: March 5, 1968

“I’m in St. Louis, now,” Gilgamesh said, whispering into the mouthpiece of the phone outside Pistol Pete’s
Pawnshop.  “I would like you to do me a few favors.”

“Favors?  What sort of favors?”  Shadow asked.

“Well, first, I would like Tiamat found.  I need to find out which government agency is keeping her, and where.”

Shadow paused, thinking.  “You don’t ask for small favors, do you?”

“No.  I would like this kept quiet, too.  I’m finding I don’t trust a great many Crows with whom I exchange letters.”  Gilgamesh waited uneasily for Shadow’s response to his overly formal and bold request.  Shadow followed a share-and-share-alike attitude regarding the Crows.  Like one, like them all, Shadow said.  Factional politics was destroying the better-organized Focuses.  Shadow thought the Crows couldn’t afford factional politics.

“So,” Shadow said, “Your call.  Who do you trust?”

Gilgamesh breathed a sigh of relief.  “You, of course.  Sinclair, Ezekiel, Sky and Midgard.  Occum, though he doesn’t trust me.”

“Occum?  My friend Occum hasn’t been willing to deal with other Crows in person since the Philadelphia Massacre.  He suspects something bad is going on and won’t say what.  He’s also got at least three tamed Beast Men now, and in his infrequent letters he claims to be making progress.  I’m not saying he’s untrustworthy, but his life is changing and I’m reserving judgment until I see what sort of Crow emerges later.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  Exactly.  Exactly why Gilgamesh wanted Occum in, because Gilgamesh also suspected something bad was going on.  The more he thought about Tiamat’s capture, the more improbable everything seemed.  Tiamat had ample police contacts.  Why didn’t they warn her?  How did they get so many police, state troopers and FBI into town so quickly?  How did they work through the standard jurisdiction issues?  Why did the Beast Men stand nearby to witness Tiamat’s capture?  He couldn’t answer a single one of his questions.

However, if he work
ed with Shadow, he would have to live with Shadow’s fears.  He would contact Occum on his own, later, regarding his plans.

“Second, I need to
find out where the Skinner – Stacy Keaton – has ended up.  I’m going to try and convince her to lead a rescue of Tiamat.  If I can’t convince her by letter, I’m going to have to try to contact her in person.”

“She’s somewhere on the West Coast, but I don’t know the exact location,” Shadow said.  He paused.  “
Contacting her again is a terrible risk.  Especially dealing with her in person.”

“Yes. 
Of course,” Gilgamesh said.  He didn’t think of his first meeting with the Skinner as ‘contacting her’, as he had been tied to a chair at the time.  “I’d much rather avoid any personal meetings.”

Shadow paused again.
  Two young black men hurried over to the front door of Pistol Pete’s carrying bulky items under their worn coats.  They entered the shop quickly, after first glancing to the left and right.  “You’d better take care of yourself, Gilgamesh.  The Skinner, bad enough on her own right, deals with the darkest of Focuses.  There’s no telling what she might do if she got her hands on you.”

“Yes, yes,” Gilgamesh said.  “
I won’t talk to the Skinner in person, save as an absolute last resort.”  Even the thought of such a meeting made him break out in a sweat.

“Anything else?”

“I need a better way of contacting Sky, like a phone number of that ‘Focus HR’ he lives in the shadow of in Toronto.  If I’m going to go and be adventurous, I figure I’d better talk to the real deal and get some pointers.”

“My.  Okay, troublemaker, if you’re willing to tell me everything you did once you’re finished with this adventure of yours, I’ll get all of this information for you,” Shadow said.

Carol Hancock: March 6, 1968

In the slow silent hours of night, under the harsh unblinking light of the caged bulb, I prayed.  Or tried to pray.

Praying was always an unsettling experienc
e for me.  I had no right to God’s mercy, or any form of love or favors, and I always came to him awkwardly.  Yes, I know theologically how none of us has a right to God’s love or mercy, but as an Arm, it hits harder.

In captivity, I
prayed anyway, knowing how badly I needed his help.  I closed my eyes and opened my mind, searching for that tenuous connection to the Almighty.  For the first time, I felt something.  A response, a sense of life, will, on the other end, wanting to connect with me, bring me in to its embrace.  A flash of white robes, sea green eyes.  Darkness.  Madness.  An unmistakable sensation of female.

My heart rate spiked and I tried to sit up
.  The chains binding me held me down.  This was
not
God.

What sort of hell had I entered, where even prayer was forbidden?

I settled back into position and tried to bring my heart rate back down where it belonged, eyes open wide, not daring to close them for fear of encountering whatever aspect of Satan ruled this hell.

I told myself firmly that God was still out there.  He would still watch me even if I couldn’t pray to him.  He would know I tried to pray.

I told myself firmly I had run into some random juice effect, preying on my vulnerable mind.  I wasn’t really in the hands of Satan.

I didn’t try to pray again.

The lights didn’t change over the long hours
I watched with wide open eyes, but I suspected the night had turned to morning again.  The first round of aides came in and loosened my chains just a bit.  Enough to let me shift positions, painfully, but not enough to move.  The pain reminded me that my wounds remained unhealed, not even counting the spinal injury.  My oft-wounded left shoulder felt off in a very bad way.

Every few hours an aide would come in, change the IV, check my catheter bag and its hideous non-urine-colored contents and check my always
-seeping bandages.  The aides always came with a guard escort; two of them would hold guns on me as a third tightened my chain so that I couldn’t touch the aide as he worked.  That third guard couldn’t have tightened the chain by himself if I hadn’t let him, but for now, I cooperated.  I let them think the pulley made them stronger than me.

The aide carefully never came
close to my hands.

Later that morning I fouled myself
, forcing the aide to clean me up.  I still lay on my stomach and in this position, he would be able to clean me, but the sheet under me was a problem.  Because of the cart’s design, he couldn’t get the sheet off with my feet locked down.

“Hey, Fritz, gimme the key here,” the aide
said to one of the guards, pushing the black monitor to the side.  He was a little bit shorter than six feet, heavy, with a kind of flabby softness.  He had a faint, foul odor of someone who should wash more often.

“What are you doing, there?” Fritz
said.

“I gotta get at this sheet.  I need her legs out of the way.”

“You outta your mind, Johnny?  You can’t let her go.”

“Give it a rest, Fritz.  What’s she gonna do?  She’s
half-dead and a cripple besides.  She can’t even keep from crapping all over herself.  Gimme the keys.”  He reeked of fear and false bravado.  I couldn’t have asked for better if I tried.

Fritz looked me over.  I closed my eyes and
acted harmless.  Johnny prodded my leg and it wiggled limply.  Fritz shrugged and threw the keys to Johnny.

Johnny unlocked my legs and changed the sheet, still staying carefully out of range of my hands.  My legs flopped uselessly. 
As Johnny surmised, I was no less helpless with my legs unchained.  He carefully locked me back down again when he finished.

After they left I lay on my table and scratched around the surgical tape
holding the sensors to my body.  The tape irritated my skin, a line of red welts growing around each piece of tape.  I’m not normally subject to rashes, but I had one now.  It would be so easy to just rip the sensors off me, free myself of the itch, and free myself from the invasive curiosity of the doctors.

I didn’t.  Right next to me, the machine continued with its steady beep, watching over me from my left, as the camera watched me from the right.

The machine was large and black, a construct of metal and glass.  My metal cot lay crosswise in the cell, with my right side to the bars and the camera and my left to the black machine.  Nothing blocked the view of either the guard or the camera.

The monitor itself
sat almost against the back wall of the cell.  My table rolled.  Even better, the lines going from the monitor to the sensors connected me to the black machine.

My jailors had left me a weapon.

With a little bit of careful shifting of the weight of my body and tension on the sensor leads, I would be able to bring myself close enough to that monitor to reach it with my right hand.  A few swift punches would crumple the thin metal shell and give me access to the machinery inside.  I should be able to use the remains of the metal shell as a weapon.  If I threw the metal remains edgewise and gave it enough spin, I suspected I could kill someone.  The machinery inside would almost certainly provide something to use as a lock pick.

The monitor wasn’t the only weapon my captors had provided me. 
The IV, taped to the back of my left hand, for one.  The IV bottle hung on a hook at my feet, but a flip of the tube when the bottle was light would bring it down.  That glass bottle was another weapon, the IV needle another lock pick.

So no, I
wouldn’t pull the sensors off or pull the IV out.  No matter how much they itched.  I wasn’t doing anything, now; I was in no condition to escape.  The time would come.  I would wait.

‘She has a severed spine.  She
’ll never walk again.’  Fools.  They knew nothing.  I expected my severed spine would heal.  Depending on how many days passed since my capture, my spine might heal as soon as today.  No matter.  I would be able to escape this place.  I had plenty of juice for a good burn during an escape.  Despite how much I had used while healing, I had at least a week before withdrawal threatened me.

A bit later a different aide came. This one, another man, took a blood sample.  I wondered if all the staff were men.  I had expected female nurses.  The only idea I came up with was the possibility they considered this place too dangerous for women.  Can’t have the ladies dealing with a dangerous Arm.  The ladies can become Arms and Monsters, no problem.  Can’t deal with them, though.

Dr. Wilson came by an hour later and checked my wounds.  They heal
ed slowly, because the sheer number of them overwhelmed my healing abilities.  I also suspected the foul nature of the building affected my healing.  Dr. Wilson seemed pleased with what he saw, but left without saying anything to me.

McIntyre came in a while after Wilson.  McIntyre was of medium height, about thirty-five years old.  His short brown hair was just beginning to recede and he practically vibrated with a contained nervous energy.  He smelled of soap, aftershave and deodorant.  His shirt, socks and underwear were all freshly washed, but he wore suits several times before he sent them to the cleaners and he also clearly spent a lot of time among people who smoked.  He gargled with Listerine to cover bad breath
, from a problem with his gums.  He wasn’t married, he had been drinking last night, and he had jacked off in the shower this morning.

I knew McIntyre.  He and his Arm Task Force people
had turned the last half of my stay at the St. Louis Detention Center into a sadistic nightmare.  I would give a lot to have McIntyre’s hand for my collection. Unlike Enkidu’s hand, I bet I could avoid trading McIntyre’s hand away.  Nice little hand.  I would put it in a shadowbox and display it on my wall.

I
would give even more to have his corpse.

He
came into my cell smug, delighted with his victory, and strutting like a kid with his first car.  The instant he laid eyes on me he became nervous.  Even with me all chained up, some instinct made him wary.

He took one look at the black monitor machine and the IV and said, “What the hell is going on here?  Are you all out of your minds?” 
My stomach sank.

The guards looked blank.  McIntyre glared at them.
“Get her damned doctor down here
right now
.  Pronto.  We’ve got to get this
thing
,” he waved his hand angrily at the monitor, “out of here and get this IV where she can’t reach it.”

Fuck!

I had overplayed my cooperation.  When I didn’t pull those sensors off, McIntyre recognized my actions as out of character.  Dammit.  If I had pulled the sensors off, I might still have the IV.

Or maybe not.  McIntyre might have removed
the IV anyway, just out of general paranoia.

I must have let a flicker of emotion show on my face because McIntyre smiled.

“Come on, Carol. You didn’t think we would let you escape that easily, did you?  This time we’re going to make you actually work at it.”  Smug bastard.  I got my face under control again and turned my head to the other side in contempt.