No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (8 page)

“What’s my role in this to be, ma’am?” Tiamat said.

“I want you to organize us an army,” the Skinner said.  “I want it ready by this time next year, or sooner if possible.”  Tiamat paled.  “Step one for you is to finish recovering, which you have to do under any circumstances.  Step two would be to secure yourself a new territory.  Then the army.”  She paused.  “Scratch that.  There’s no need for you to turn down recruits during the first two steps if they walk across your path.”

“Ma’am,” Tiamat said, her voice actually shaky.  “How big an army?  What sort of army?”

“I want 40 to 60 real recruits and a lot of stooges, perhaps as many as a thousand.  The real recruits need to be people tied to you who won’t betray you, even by accident.  The stooges need to be in small groups, so we can use them as needed, in small numbers.  The stooges shouldn’t even know we exist.  Remember how you were betrayed in Chicago.”

“Ma’am, actually, I don’t.”  Gilgamesh had to turn away, the ache in his gut consuming his entire self.  Carol had been through so much, and it took so much for even an echo of her Tiamat self to shine through.

The Skinner sighed.  “One of your loose recruits, Pete Sanchek, had been trolling your assumed name around in the underbelly of the Chicago police department and telling them you could turn into a demon.  He finally got the ear of an FBI Agent serving as liaison, who recognized the ‘turn into a demon’ as the Arm predator effect.”

“Ma’am.  I should have killed him.”

“Killed him or fully broken him to your service.  Live and learn; do better next time,” the Skinner said.  “Understand that if things worked normally you would have, at worst, been forced to flee Chicago with your tail between your legs, giving me a good belly laugh.  As it was, only three hours passed between Sanchek’s chat with the FBI Agent and the first boots on the ground in Skokie.”

Gilgamesh goggled.  He knew the attack had happened fast, but three hours was insane.  “Then Officer Canon must be a real police officer or federal agent.  I’m going to have to check out the FBI, dammit.”

His comment caught both Arms by surprise.  “Kiddo, I think you’re going to solve this,” the Skinner said to him.  “You’ve got the right sort of mind for this kind of work.”  Keaton paused.  “So, who wants to hear about my swamp?”

Carol Hancock: April 17, 1968

Keaton leaned back in her chair and studied the night sky.  I had no idea what Keaton wanted or where she was going with her ‘swamp’ comment.  This whole situation bothered the hell out of me, for no good reason.  “I transformed five years ago; today marks the five year anniversary of the start of my stay at the James Mead Transform Sanitarium in upstate New York,” Keaton said.  She had never before spoken of her past.  I drank this up like a thousand page page-turner novel, instantly forgetting all my worries.  “Before Mead, the Feds held me for a week in a now defunct Transform Transfer Center in Westchester County, run by the Communicable Disease Center, what they called the CDC back then.”

President Johnson, as part of his Great Society, had turned the Communicable Disease Center into the Centers for Disease Control, of which a goodly part of their budget went to Transform Sickness research.  According to Zielinski, they wasted most of their budget on Transform management and bureaucracy, not actual research.  I had never caught Keaton in a mood like this before, though the wonder of the mood didn’t even come close to papering over the agony of knowing Gilgamesh would be leaving.

I didn’t understand my feelings.  They were too strong and involved emotions I couldn’t name.  I felt like I had agreed to give up a limb.

“As bad as the Feds are now about Transform Sickness, the idiots who held me were worse. They understood so much less back then.”  Keaton shook her head slowly.  Five years may not sound like much, but my eighteen months as an Arm contained as many memories and experiences as my entire previous life.

Sorry about not putting all of my experiences in these books – I’ll save the excess detail for when I do my complete leather-bound 120 volume memoirs.

“My keepers were bastards,” Keaton said, hyena laughter in her voice.  “They published my death notice the day they moved me to the Mead, so today is also the fifth anniversary of my death.  Officially dead, they were free to do to me whatever they wanted, and they did.  They certainly didn’t ask my permission.  I didn’t know why at the time, but I learned much later the entire show happened because a year earlier Rose Desmond, Zielinski’s favorite dead Arm, shot him up just before she got killed.  The authorities now thought of us as dangerous Monster Focuses, instead of pathetic failed Focuses.  They kept me in the maximum security section of the Mead, and, as well, in a cell too tiny for exercise.”

I sensed understanding growing in Gilgamesh, an understanding of why Keaton became Keaton.  This story was for him, yet another tie to bind him to the Arms.  Her story seemed almost inevitable to me, based on what I had gone through.

“Their treatment made me so angry I refused to participate in any way.  As you might expect, my defiance didn’t last, as they broke me by using the juice weapon, the same way they broke you, Carol.  Only they did it by accident, as they also withheld food and water.

“I became theirs and did whatever they wanted.  The bastards, though, kept me on tight rations, so I never had enough to eat.  Because of their treatment, I became seriously cranky.  The only defiance I had left was that I refused to talk.  My defiance proved of minimal use, as they didn’t particularly care if I talked or not and they didn’t push the issue, which unfortunately later led to the common CDC-backed story about Arms losing their ability to talk.  The worst part about those early weeks was, since I was officially dead and cut off from my husband and family, I didn’t have anyone to sleep with after taking juice.”

Keaton had a husband.  That was an appalling thought.

“They brought in the FBI early to run security at the Mead, and as time went on the Feebs took more control over the situation.  This was Joe Patrelle’s fief as a Division Chief, his rank back then, and his two main flunkies on the scene were Special Agent Patrick McIntyre and his partner, Special Agent David Warshauer.  As time went on my mind deteriorated from the conditions, and unlike you, Carol, I didn’t have any prior life wisdom to fall back on.  I transformed at the age of 23, married for just over a year to a rough man who had taken to beating me when he got drunk.  I’d never been to college and my only work experience was three years as a waitress.  I knew absolutely shit about anything.  I had no friends at the Mead, becoming just another lab animal, and the people who considered me human hated me because I killed to live.  The only good thing about the entire mess was that I never suffered any delusions about anyone being on my side.”

Grim.  I would be perpetually angry, too.

Keaton kept talking, staring off into the sky, reminiscing.  “About a month after they broke me they decided I wasn’t dangerous anymore and I got more freedom, including access to a weight room left over from the place’s prison days.  Whenever I couldn’t stand the boredom any longer I’d get the guards to take me there and I’d pump iron.  They thought I was crazy, but I’d do it for hours at a time.  I didn’t have anything else to do and after a while my exercises started to feel good.

“Two and a half months in they screwed up getting me a kill by two hours.  It took me a week and two more kills to put my sanity back together enough to be functional.  As the two of you are well aware, those two hours of withdrawal left me with a nasty problem I’d love to fix but have no idea how.”  Keaton smiled her sardonic smile, but I think even a normal would have spotted the fact her smile was false.  She used the false smile to paper over a gaping raw spot in her soul.

Gilgamesh coughed, barely audible.  Keaton turned to him.  “Ma’am?” he whispered.  She motioned for him to speak.  “I have reason to believe that some leading senior Crows, such as the three who signed my mission letter, have the skills and knowledge to fix your problem.”

“You can metasense the problem, then?  What is it?”

“It’s…”  Gilgamesh paused.  “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I understand Wire’s technical explanation enough to translate, but I think in your terms your withdrawal scars left an opening which attracts bad juice to you, leaving you over the long haul with Monster juice in your juice structure.”

“Who’s Wire?  You’ve never talked about him before,” Keaton said, demanding.

Gilgamesh shivered and held my hand tight.  “He…  This is painful, ma’am.  Wire was a trainee Guru in Philadelphia and for several months, my teacher – until the Beast Man you killed in Philadelphia, Grendel, killed him after Grendel and Enkidu captured Wire, Tolstoy and myself.”

Keaton hissed.  “He was my Crow the same way you’re Carol’s?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Fuck,” Keaton said, barely audible.

She went back to watching the stars and didn’t say anything for another five minutes. I watched her put away her rage until she buried it from view.  Not gone, but waiting for some appropriate time to be let loose again.

“After I recovered, I was no longer broken to their will, but they didn’t realize it.”  Now there’s an Arm trick I didn’t suspect.  I had been worrying Biggioni would be able to come to me at any time, threaten my juice supply, say ‘heel’ and I would heel.  I guessed the juice lever only worked if you actually supplied the juice.  “I took Special Agent Warshauer as a lover and convinced him I was being horribly mistreated.  He slipped up a few days later and let me take his weapon, after which I convinced him to let me escape.”

She held him at gunpoint and forced him to let her out.

“I didn’t know shit about how to escape, so I couldn’t shake the manhunt.  We got jumped by two cops just outside the Mead’s outer perimeter.  Both of us got shot up and Warshauer died.”

Thus the reason McIntyre became her Ahab.  I hadn’t realized his hatred was personal.

“I went berserk and killed the cops, moving faster than I’d thought possible.  I’d discovered the burn.  My discovery almost killed me before I figured out how to stop the burn.”  She laughed, a laugh of pain and loss.  This was where Keaton became hard.  I wondered if she had cared for Warshauer, and suspected she had.

“I was on the run for nine months after my escape.  At first, I tried not to kill or even hurt people, but I made mistakes.  I stole when I needed to.  I used cash for everything, disguised myself as well as I knew how.  I figured out how to pass myself off as a man.  I took kills whenever I found them, but every time I did, the Feds found my trail again.  I didn’t understand how to hide my kills.  I had money, so I could eat whenever I got hungry.  My muscles started to grow like wildfire and I had miserable problems with them.  Every time I slacked off on the exercise the least bit, my muscle problems got worse.  In the middle of a nation-wide manhunt, I needed to spend time at a gym every day.

“The Feds finally caught up with me at a gym.  I broke into a gym in the middle of the night and I pushed myself until I could hardly move, trying to ease the pain in my muscles.  I was so exhausted I was shaking.  I could barely stand.  The Feds got to me while I took my shower.”  Keaton shook her head.

“That night we all found out what an Arm is really capable of.  I was stark naked in the shower and I cleared the top of the shower rod as they shot the curtain out underneath me.  Six FBI agents were in the locker room with me and I killed every one of them.  I was burning so hot it was a wonder the gym didn’t catch fire.  I ran and blundered into another group of six FBI agents, including McIntyre.  I tried to shield myself with the big weight plates, but they shot me in more places than I care to think about.  I threw smaller plates like Frisbees at the agents; I killed several of them and broke McIntyre’s leg.

“They weren’t ready for me.  By then, I was doing things beyond the capabilities of top male athletes, although I didn’t look as muscular as Carol did when she left St. Louis.  They didn’t expect me to be dangerous and they didn’t expect me to be hard to kill.  I got away.”

Keaton stopped speaking for a moment.  Remembering again.  “None of us knew shit.  The Feds these days wouldn’t send just six men into a small room with me. They would have had the exits blocked. They would lay out a shooting gallery and they would be carrying heavier weaponry.  There would be a hell of a lot more of them.

“The funny thing was, once I got away and started recovering, I discovered my muscles actually felt better.  This was the first time after my escape from the Mead that my muscles felt better rather than worse.  Fighting for my life after I worked myself to exhaustion turned out to be enough to do some good.

“After the gym shower ambush I changed my style.  I realized I was being stupid and that if I kept on as I had been, eventually they’d kill me.  I had to either decide to be a normal, give myself up and die, or I had to reject all the half-assed rules I still tried to live by and make my own rules.  I needed to stop worrying about right or wrong and just worry about survival.”

Keaton was skipping a lot of her story here.  I didn’t care, engrossed in the abbreviated story she told.  She paused and looked over at Gilgamesh.  “After several short misadventures I found out the Feds held another Arm in California, in the Bakersfield Detention Center.  I went there to break her out but she killed herself before I arrived.  I figured I needed to know more about myself, so I kidnapped the leading researcher, the only one there whose name I recognized from my desultory reading on the subject.”