All Beasts Together (The Commander) (5 page)

While I cursed fate the idiot driver
exited the freeway.  I couldn’t afford to get out of the camper in broad daylight on some damned street.  I waited.  Did they stop for gas?  No.  Did they stop for food?  No.  Did they stop at a hotel?  No.

Instead, they drove for a few minutes before pulling into a driveway in a subdivision filled with identical small houses, probably around ten years old.  Not an ounce of cover in the place.  I heard the people complain about lugging luggage and their stiff bodies and I placed them as an older couple, retired or at least with their kids
out of the house.  They slammed the door to their house on the way in to continue their argument in private.

Now what?

Well, I had to be patient.  Very patient.  Dusk fell about three hours later and with the night, I was out of there.  I broke into the first empty house I found, showered, took stock, glanced at the phone book…

No.  That was what I planned on doing.

What I really did was fall into a state I had never before experienced, as soon as I got out of the camper, stretched, and walked around enough to get my blood flowing.  My conscious thoughts ceased.  Words left me.  My vision narrowed.  The only thing that mattered was finding juice.  Juice or death.  Each beat of my heart drummed out the message ‘juice’.  Juice juice juice juice…

Five people screamed at me, beating at me, three men and two women.  Other people surrounded me, scattering away.  The last thing I remembered was getting out of the camper.

I wasn’t anywhere near the camper.

I stood over a corpse in a fancy restaurant.  Blood and gunsmoke covered the floor and the air.  I held an empty .32 handgun in my right hand.  In my left hand I held Enkidu’s grisly souvenir paw.

Love those Arm basic instincts.  At least I knew I had my priorities in the right place.

My juice count ran low, say 105 or so.  The well-dressed corpse at my feet died smiling and I guessed he had been a male Transform.  I had just drawn from him.  I had a bad feeling my kill had recently been a
tagged
Transform.  Some Focus somewhere owned him.  I threw off two of the men beating on me, took my kill’s wallet (his name was Richard Kensington), decided the older woman beating on me was his wife, the younger his daughter.  I took their purses and ran for the kitchen.

Kitchens always had back doors and I wanted to be gone before the police showed up.  Twice in a row I
had screwed up a kill.  If I survived this one I would be shocked.  Keaton had given me the lowdown on the misery of an urban police dragnet.  Sloppy Arms stood out.

Especially wounded sloppy Arms.

I had never before ‘come to’ from a kill.  Normally, they knocked me out.  I guessed I had been near withdrawal for real.  Keaton had never told me about the somnambulist hunter routine.

I couldn’t imagine what people
thought, save “Monster!”  Still caked in mud, blood, and ripped clothing, I clearly didn’t present well.  My left arm still hung funny at the shoulder.  The makeshift bandages around my shredded breasts had come loose and showed fresh red muscle open to the air.  No wonder some of the restaurant guests were puking instead of running.

In the parking lot behind the restaurant
I intercepted some guy trying to get into a car.  I grabbed his keys, tossed him over the next car, started his car and left.  Behind me I heard sirens.  I ditched the car four blocks away in the entrance to a closed parking garage and headed off on foot.

I
found myself on the edge of a downtown area.  If I read the clues right, downtown Pittsburgh, the largest town east of the Mississippi Keaton never hunted in.  Sometime in the past she had been nearly captured here by some damned Focus from Hell and I had a bad feeling I had just juice sucked one of her Transforms.

Carol Hancock, meet deep deep shit.  Again.

Keaton laughed at me.  “Some monster comes in, all pissed because you stole his kill, and so you try to climb on his dick?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.  I turned away, eyes smarting.  There are some things you don’t want to talk about, especially to your slavemaster.  I met Ed’s eyes.

“I can’t make love to you when you’re so injured, Beth,” he said.  “I need to get you to a hospital.”

“Do it anyway,” I said.  I didn’t want to kill him, but I knew I had to.  Keaton had made that clear.  He was too much of a security risk.  So, at the moment of passion, I held him tight and I broke his neck. Why did everything have to hurt so much?

“That’s no way to treat a man,” my mother said.  “You’ll find, Carol, that men are not very attentive lovers when they’re dead.  You should have waited until the second or third go round.  Patience, Carol, patience!”

“Oh, Mom,” I said.  “He sat on the duck at the theater, and I had to punish him.  Five pickles aren’t worth even a side bet.”

“Helen, the carpeting in the kitchen is burnt orange.  Who in their right mind would put thick shag carpeting in a kitchen, anyway?”  The man muttered something under his breath about an almond range and dishwasher.

“Oh, dear, look at this,” a woman said.  “They converted the under-the-stairway closet into a pantry!  How ingenious!”

I sat up.  What the hell?

I
lay on a queen-sized bed, all alone.  No Keaton, no Ed, no mother: just me, bleeding all over the sheets like the Arm that I was.  The sounds came from below, from the first floor of the house.  I vaguely remembered how I got here: injured and running from the police after taking a kill in a public place.  Vacant furnished house, for sale signs, no cars in the garage.  I had made myself at home.

I was used to hallucinations and screwy dreams.  The voices below weren’t hallucinations.  A real estate agent was showing the home to some potential buyers.

You ever have days like this?

I crept out of the bed, gathered
my meager possessions, and looked for an exit.  None.  However, I found an attic access in the small walk-in closet off the bedroom.  Not even a ladder, just a hole in the ceiling covered by a piece of wood, painted white to match the walls.  I hopped up and grabbed the side of the ceiling hole with my good hand, pushing the board to the side.  It moved easily and I flipped myself up and into the attic.  I replaced the board and lay down on the typical attic mess.  Naked.

I took stock of my situation.  I hurt, to be expected.  The fiberglass attic insulation made me itch all over.  My muscles ached, but not as bad as I feared given
how long ago I did my last full workout.  I remembered Keaton’s comments about how much better she felt after a fight with the cops and decided the same processes had saved me from my normal post-hunt stiff-muscled agony.  I was famished, wounded, and low on juice despite a kill last night and another before Enkidu raped me.  I was in an unfamiliar town, with the local cops on my ass, with damned little cash, and I had killed a Transform tagged by a Focus mean enough to roast me on a spit.  The last was a biggie.  However, Keaton had survived taking a tagged Transform.  Somehow.  I would, too.

On the more mundane issues, I decided to
stay here until the real estate agent finished with the house.  Once they left I would ransack the house, fix myself up, and rest until I had recovered enough to travel.

Good plan.  Unfortunately, Helen had a problem with blood in the bathroom and started screaming.  Oops.  Got the bed covered, forgot about the bathroom.  She, her
fussy husband and the real estate agent fled the place posthaste.  At least the phones in the house had been disconnected so when they tried to call the police they didn’t have any luck.

A few minutes after they left
, I left, too.

The clothes I borrowed didn’t fit.  I walked down the street, now several blocks away from the house where I had spent the night, in a neighborhood of well-to-do upper middle class urban homes.  Taller buildings of the city center rose to my southwest, less than a mile away.

As best I could manage, I
looked like a man, using the only option I had, the discarded clothes left in the house.  I didn’t need to worry about hiding my breasts, though.  I had no breasts to hide.  I used ripped sheets to bandage myself and hoped the bandages would hold and I wouldn’t bleed through them.  I kept Enkidu’s hand in my inner suit coat pocket.  The damn thing still twitched occasionally.

The neighborhood was called Stanton Heights, the sort of place where
the cops picked up the street bums faster than the garbage men picked up the trash.  I looked seedy and wouldn’t pass a close inspection.  For one thing, besides the awful clothes, I wore rubber snow boots and no shoes, just a half dozen pairs of socks.  Men’s socks.  I needed food.  I smelled food, to the east, down the hill that gave Stanton Heights its name, toward what looked like a park and museum district.

I passed the
ironically named Snow Way and found a diner a few blocks farther east on Stanton.  I ordered a large breakfast.  After my order I stopped with a few seconds of shock when I realized what I had done: I had ordered in a man’s baritone voice. Throughout my entire apprenticeship Keaton had tried to force me to imitate a man’s voice.  She had used every trick in her book as well as some experimental torture techniques and I
still
hadn’t been able to.  I had a woman’s voice, dammit.  Sort of high and bird-like, actually.  However, dressed in men’s clothing, I had just spoken in a man’s voice without even thinking.  The adjustment came naturally.  Why hadn’t I been able to do so before?

I
had been resisting Keaton.  A subconscious vain attempt to preserve my identity, perhaps?  I liked the thought I had managed to resist her in
something
.  Now, out on my own, when I needed the skill for survival I found my man voice.

Breakfast was good.  I buffaloed the waiter into thinking I paid, went and found the next place open for breakfast, and got another one.  Life was looking up.

At least until I spotted the tagged Transform who tailed me.

The situation bothered me a lot.  I ducked into an alley, turned into another, crossed a side street, and turned north on Portland.  The tagged Transform still followed.

My metasense had trouble picking him up.  I
had first spotted him when he came within a couple hundred feet of me, but now as he approached closer, I got a better look at his metapresence.  He seemed covered by something, a coat of strangely woven juice that extended out away from him several feet.  I had never metasensed anything like it before, and he gave me the creeps, besides.  I watched him closely as I headed north on Portland.  I swore he wore multiple Focus tags.  Three, if I guessed correctly.

He definitely tail
ed me, even from out of sight.  Transform men didn’t have a metasense.  How did he follow?

As I walked the sky darkened.  Within a few minutes a cold rain started to fall, nothing more than a light mist.  Portland ended and I had to turn, so I turned right.  The road, Hampton, headed east for several blocks
and came to a dead end.  Before then, I turned back toward the park to my north, on Heberton.

I was in no condition to fight.  Some instinct
deep inside me recognized the juice coat the Transform wore as a danger.  I had no weaponry but knives.  Running would break my cover, as would snagging a car.  My thuggery would have to wait until night fell hours from now.  I reached the park.  Highland Park, a hilly wooded sanctuary filled with places to hide.  I just needed to shake the man after me…

I spotted the second one, off to my left.  I started to jog
but stopped immediately; with my injuries even jogging was too difficult in my snow boots.  They followed.  The predator had been turned to prey, and the irony didn’t escape me.  Even my risky final option had vanished.  In the worst case, I thought I would try to grab the single stalker and drain him of juice, praying his juice coat wasn’t the danger it seemed.  The option was moot because I held too much juice to be able to ignore my normal post-kill knockout problem.  The second Transform would be able to attack me easily while I lay twitching with unconscious pleasure.

I passed a small lake, crested a hill, and s
potted my next problem.  The park ended in a river somewhere ahead of me.  Trees kept me from spotting any streets at the river’s edge, but my gut churned.  The Transforms boxed me in, trying to capture me.

I
had been close enough to both Transforms to know that neither wore the tag of the Focus who held the Transform I killed last night.  That left the question of whether Kensington belonged to the big bad Focus, or these mooks did.  Logically, the latter seemed more likely, but logic and I were having a mild spat right now, so I ignored my analysis.  I turned east, away from the two Transforms on my tail, cutting through a wooded area of the park.  I had no idea what lay ahead of me, except it had to be better than having my trackers trap me with my back against the river.  The Transforms followed, relentless, patient, hundreds of feet back.

I was going downhill by the time I came out of the trees
and found a lawn of dead grass ahead.  A boulevard ran below the dead lawn, blocking the way, and on the other side, trouble.  Some sort of large complex of low buildings lay across the road, blocked by tall fences.  A sign about a thousand feet away read ‘VA Medical Center, Washington Blvd Entrance #3’.  MPs guarded the entrance.  I turned back to the north, still boxed.  However, as I turned I spotted a major boulevard running along the river, a way out of the box.  After some stiff walking I reached the river’s edge and started east along the street, Allegheny Boulevard.