All Beasts Together (The Commander) (31 page)

All better, all fixed?  Not hardly.

---

“Go, Bobby!” I screamed
over the roaring crowd.  “Counterpunch!”  Tonight I dressed as a cheap floozy and didn’t care a bit.  Bobby and I had arranged a semi-pro match for him in Oak Lawn, outside of my normal stomping grounds.  Two weeks had passed since I went Keaton on him, during which he had gotten himself back into fighting trim.  Real exercise had finally worked the last of the pneumonia out of his system and he was a young man.  He recovered.  “Punch, punch, punch!”

Did
I cheat?  Not sure, and not sure if I cared.  I directed my predator effect at Bobby and only Bobby.  In the ring he couldn’t see me, so I focused my predator through my voice.  I stiffened Bobby’s spine, sped him up and gave him more confidence than was really justified.

He knocked out his opponent in the third.

Afterward, after he showered and dressed, I went over and gave him a hug.  He mostly controlled the cringe now, so small and involuntary only an Arm would notice.  The cringe remained, though.  I treated him to a late dinner at a local high-class restaurant.  As always, his eyes followed my every move, wary.

Back home he bossed around the new hires and
rained down hell on our new groundskeeper, who he considered a lazy jerk.  To the outside world he was strong, virile and in control.

With me?  Well, I still had work to do, didn’t I?

That night I had my first pinball nightmare since I left Philadelphia.  As usual, I raced around
, chased by giant steel pinballs, watched by the androgynous evil clown on the backboard of the pinball game.  I awoke covered in sweat.  When the fake police officer, Canon, accosted me in Philadelphia I had realized Officer Canon was the evil clown of my dreams.  That bitch – I was 90% sure Canon was a Focus – was back in my life.

This
did
not
improve things, not at all.

Gilgamesh:  January 20, 1967

Gilgamesh
stopped breathing for a moment as he carried his groceries past the reeking garbage cans and attempted to avoid tripping over the cracked walkway.  Behind him he heard the constant roar of the Edens Expressway, busy even at night.  His apartment was a run-down dismal affair, right next to the expressway and surrounded by asphalt and broken glass.  However, the place was cheap, furnished, and within four miles of Tiamat.

He dodged the broken bottles, old trash, and
a mangy half-starved cat, which always seemed to be lurking nearby.  Faint mews of yet another litter of kittens rose from under the stairs.  Stupid cat – the current warmth came from a January thaw, not the end of winter.

Gilgamesh
had reached the top of the rusted metal stairs when he sensed the first flicker off in the distance.  He froze and the panic washed through him like an ocean wave.  His groceries dropped to the ground, forgotten.  The flicker was close.  Just over a mile.  Far too close.

Gilgamesh ran.

He metasensed the flicker again, insanely close.  He would never mistake it, not with the number of Beast Man traces and encounters he faced in Chicago.  A Beast Man charged.  A Beast should never be able to get so close to him.  He didn’t recognize this Beast Man, but the Beast could kill him just the same.  It would, if the Beast caught him.

Gilgamesh leapt over the railing to the ground, recklessly showing off capabilities no normal could match.  He sprinted back to his truck, praying for once the truck would cooperate and not stall out underneath him.  He needed to hide under Tiamat’s glow, his standard procedure when dealing with the Beasts.  Besides the Arm dross, this was the reason he followed her.

This time the Beast actively hunted him.

Tiamat was nowhere in his range.  Her home
stood empty and he didn’t sense her in any of her usual nearby haunts.  He thought she was in Chicago somewhere, but she might have gone hunting without him realizing.  If she had gone hunting, he would have to flee Chicago to escape.  If the Beast Man didn’t catch him first.

T
he Beast Man had masked himself to cover his approach.  Had this been how Crow Killer’s victims had died so inexplicably?

Assume Tiamat
is in Chicago, he decided.  He ran through the places she might be in his mind, furiously trying to pick the right one.

He came up with
no good answer.  In the evening, she should have been home or at one of the nearby apartments where several of her people lived.  Failing that, he next guessed the China Garden, out on the Tri-State Tollway north of O’Hare.  He really hoped she was there because he didn’t have the room to be wrong.  Sicking up on a Beast Man wouldn’t get him anywhere.  If she had gone hunting, he would likely die.

He made it to his truck.  Much to his relief, his multi-colored wreck started easily.  He backed up into the parking lot with a squealing of tires and wound his way out on Varden street, only to get stuck behind four cars at
the stoplight where Varden dead ended into Wilson.  He banged on the steering wheel as the Beast Man closed, cutting across to put Gilgamesh between the Beast Man and the expressway, ready for the Beast’s final charge.  The light eventually turned, and so did Gilgamesh.  He followed the line of cars off Wilson and on to the Edens Expressway.  Much to his surprise, the Beast Man didn’t charge.  Gilgamesh was sufficiently public to escape that variety of attack.

Sweat streamed down his face as he merged on the Edens
, driving on a city freeway for the first time since he transformed.  Crows never went on city freeways because of the stress.  It was also the first time he had ever been able to make himself take the speed all the way up to 60 miles an hour.  The truck shook and rattled with the unaccustomed speed, and the other cars scared him almost as badly as the Beast Man.

T
he Beast Man used a smart plan: boxing him in with the expressway on one side and no way to go under or over it, knowing Crows didn’t go on expressways.  This Beast held too little juice to be thinking clearly, and such cunning was a second abnormality.  These abnormalities suggested this Beast had a master working with him, and Gilgamesh’s paranoid Crow inside screamed ‘Crow Killer’.  His own juice attempted to back up in terror, but he ruthlessly quieted the sick-up, as well as the black edges of unconsciousness attempting to suck him down.

When Gilgamesh was a mile down the
Edens the Beast Man following him stopped cold and vanished.  Damned
good
metasense shielding.  Gilgamesh almost turned on the JFK when he got there.  He could take the JFK directly to the Tollway.  The JFK wasn’t finished, though, and he dreaded running into a construction zone and being forced down to the surface roads.  If he got stuck in traffic and the Beast Man appeared out from underneath whatever masked him, Gilgamesh would be a dead Crow.

His only chance was to go through downtown Chicago and take the Eisenhower out to the Tollway. 
Nearly as bad as fleeing Chicago.

Gilgamesh passed through downtown and
exited to the Eisenhower without sensing the Beast Man. He drove the twelve long miles out to the Tollway, as fast as he could stand while cars rushed by him too close and the draft from the huge rigs sucked at his rattling truck.  Every other moment he metasensed for any sign of the Beast Man.  Nothing.

Had the Beast or his master aborted the attack?  Did the Beast know or care about Tiamat?  The parallels to the Philadelphia Massacre didn’t escape him.  He half expected a second Beast Man to leap up from nowhere any time now.  He actually expected Enkidu to be the one to cut him off.  Was Enkidu’s
and Odin’s Master the Crow Killer?

Gilgamesh
exited to the Tollway and turned north.  Just after seeing the first O’Hare exit signs, he picked up Tiamat.  Gilgamesh wanted to collapse in exhausted relief once he metasensed Tiamat’s glow.  She sat in the China Garden, writing something and eating, with no knowledge of him at all.  He wasn’t secure yet, though, and he couldn’t allow himself to relax; he had five more miles to cover before her glow would conceal him.

He swung by Tiamat and came in close from behind for concealment
, parking in the lot of an auto parts store right across the street from the China Garden.  His truck looked like a perfectly ordinary truck, left here for repairs or for later pick up.  Not suspicious or unusual at all.  He hoped.  He slipped down in the seat to be invisible from outside, to make sure.

The roaring panic finally eased his grip on him as Gilgamesh waited in his truck and saw no sign of the Beast Man.  How had
the Beast Man found him to start with?  Finding a Crow was difficult and Gilgamesh had ample practice reducing his glow.  Somewhere in the distance, the Beast Man lurked.  Would he simply wait until Gilgamesh left Tiamat’s protection?  Even if the Beast Man left Chicago again, how long would Gilgamesh need to wait before he would trust the Beast was gone?

He
would wait here all night if he needed to.  After that, he would stay near Tiamat every hour of every day for the next week and flee Chicago if she left, until he was sure the Beast Man was gone.  The minutes passed, but Gilgamesh didn’t relax his vigilance.

Just before midnight
Gilgamesh metasensed the Beast’s flickering glow a mile and a half distant, almost overwhelmed by the spectacular intensity of Tiamat’s close presence. Gilgamesh got out of his truck and sprinted to the China Garden.

More flickers.  No charge.

The flickers stopped about a half mile out.  Gilgamesh shivered in fear and knelt, hugging the wall of the China Garden.  A minute passed, then another.  This was bad.  The Beast’s good metasense protections became excellent when he stopped moving.

Suddenly, the Beast Man appeared in Gilgamesh’s metasense, full on, no flickering.  The Beast leisurely walked now, at right angles to its former path.  After several minutes Gilgamesh realized the Beast circle
d the China Garden.

He didn’t understand the Beast Man’s purpose, and f
ear of the unknown made him sick-up a little, which he cleaned up once he realized what he had done.  After a moment, he realized the Beast now hunted Tiamat.  The Beast hadn’t picked her up on his metasense until he came within a half mile of the Arm.

Gilgamesh almost sicked-up everything in complete panic now, barely controlling himself.  This Beast
was
a specialist in hunting Crows, but
was
out after the Arm!  Gilgamesh had led the Beast right to her.

On the other hand, he
had seen the Skinner kill a Beast Man back in Philadelphia.  Any Beast Man who attacked an Arm risked his life.

As
the Beast Man continued his slow circle, Gilgamesh watched the angles carefully, moving to keep hidden behind Tiamat’s glow.  This Beast Man seemed on the dim side; this low on juice he should be running from the Arm.  The Beast’s stalk had to be part of a mission.  The Beast had gone after Gilgamesh first, to take Gilgamesh’s juice and improve his odds against the Arm.

Something
needed doing about these Beasts, Gilgamesh decided.  Otherwise Crows would find themselves nothing more than Beast Man emergency juice supplies.

Thirty seconds later
Tiamat put down her pen and her fork and closed her book.  She stood and talked for a moment longer before heading out the door of the China Garden.

Gilgamesh clung tight to the wall of the China Garden, around the corner and out of Tiamat’s dangerous view.  Panic hit him like a brick.  She was leaving! 
The worst of all possibilities.  He had worried over this possibility since he first spotted her in the restaurant.  He still had no solution.  If she left him he was dead, naked to the Beast Man and helpless.  He froze and tried to figure out what to do next.  He was too far from his truck.  Without his truck he couldn’t trail Tiamat.

Tiamat came out the door then, ignorant of the activity around her, tall, strong, and murderous.  She went straight to her car, a gold Mercury Cougar, with no pauses or delays.

The Beast Man was too close for this.  Tiamat was leaving him to die.  The only way to stop her from leaving was to reveal himself.  That might easily be fatal.  The Beast Man or the Arm.  They were both predators.  Either might kill him as easily as breathe.  He had to cast his lot with one or the other and he had no time at all to think.

This was
‘The lady or the tiger’ choice he had feared, except Tiamat was no lady and the Beast Man wasn’t a tiger.

Gilgamesh had follow
ed Tiamat almost since he first transformed.  She was dangerous, but familiar.  The Beast Man was the unknown.  He had seen Beast Men kill Crows with his own eyes.  Even the Skinner had been motivated more by curiosity than violence when they met for a brief moment in Philadelphia.

“Carol,” he
said, a Crow whisper.

Tiamat had been climbing into her car, but she moved like lightning.

Gilgamesh’s heartbeat spiked in terror when he sensed her move.  He knew how fast she moved but it was different to see it in person.  Her head snapped toward him with the speed of a striking snake.  She paused as she searched, no more than a fraction of a second.  He felt naked under her spotlight of attention.  When she moved, she moved quickly, coming around the corner of the China Garden, to the alley along the side where Gilgamesh hid.  So fast.  She barely touched the space in between.  He hadn’t even breathed since he spoke her name.  The sick-up started rising as his panic did.  He would vomit his sick-up on her out of pure instinctive reaction.