Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (11 page)

“Tell me all you know about male Major Transforms,” Keaton said.

“Anecdotal or scientific?”

I didn’t like his attitude, though it didn’t bother Keaton.  I let it show.  The skeevy old bastard didn’t even notice.

“Scientific of course,” Keaton said.  “If I wanted anecdotal, I would be talking to someone else, wouldn’t I?”

“Ma’am,” he said, the most perfunctory ‘ma’am’ I had heard in a long while.  “Although I’ll gladly give you the scientific information, you shouldn’t discount the anec…”

“Fuck you, Zielinski,” Keaton said, and shook her head.  “It’s gotten to the point where I don’t trust anecdotal information, even when the anecdote happens to me.”

Huh?  Was she talking about the Monster Arms encounter?

“Well, we could always trade our tall tales after I pass along the scientific information,” Zielinski said.

Keaton laughed.

I’d had enough of his attitude.  I leaned forward out of my chair and half snarled, giving Zielinski my nastiest predator pose, visualizing him peeing in his pants.

He didn’t move, but his heart rate spiked and he slowly licked his lips.  “Ma’am.  Let me…”

Keaton held up a finger after giving me a hot intolerant glare.  I sat back down and Zielinski shut up.  The tension felt cuttable while Keaton thought, hard, for two minutes.  While she thought, I replayed my own reactions in my head and didn’t like what I saw.  Despite Zielinski’s provocations, I had overstepped my place.  I made ready to grovel and prepared my mind for a merciless beat down.

“Hancock has a point,” Keaton said, surprising me.  She stood and caught my eyes.  “You grill him, however it suits you.  I’ve got some work to do.  I’ll expect a full report afterwards.”

I moved as I followed her gaze, ending up in the chair of power.  She then left.  I felt the weight of responsibility fall on my shoulders and decided I had better not screw up, so I turned to Zielinski and gave him the full predator treatment.  Zielinski nervously ran his hand through his thinning hair and inched his low stool slowly backwards.  I wondered if he realized.

“Two months ago the downtown Atlanta Transform Clinic picked up a man who showed all the signs of making a major transformation,” Zielinski said, his face icy.  “He came to them comatose, running a high fever.  They smelled juice, tested him, and found he possessed a juice count similar to a Focus.  Several days later, he woke up, killed four of the clinic staff and fled.”

Perfect.  I wondered if this was how Male Arms got their start.  “Killed? How?”

Zielinski shrugged.  “No one knows.  A nurse and an orderly were in the room when he woke up.  After the man ran from the clinic, an orderly and a doctor found the first two victims in convulsions.  Within hours, the first two victims began making normal transformations, except the transformations were accompanied by high fevers and the convulsions continued sporadically.  They brought in a Focus and she couldn’t bear to be in the same room with those two
. The room, she said, was filled with what Focuses term ‘bad juice’.  After two days, the victims’ hearts stopped.”

“You said four deaths,”
said.

“Yes.  Both the orderly and doctor who came into the room contracted Transform Sickness the following day and died the same way, even though they hadn’t been near the man after he woke up.  No one else was affected.”

“Nothing else extraordinary about the male Major Transform?”  Zielinski shook his head.  “I want more information on this. You’ll get it for me.”

Zielinski got up from his stool.
“Sit,” I said.  “I didn’t say ‘now’.”  Zielinski sat back down.  I smelled his tension and saw sweat on the back of his neck.

Good.  As long as I didn’t kill or maim him, I doubted Keaton would mind.  This fool thought he was competition?  I would put him in his place.  I had to.  “So, was he the male equivalent of a Focus or an Arm?”

“Focus, ma’am.”

I nodded.  “Do you have any information about male Arms?”

“You mean Chimeras?” Zielinski said, with haughty arrogance.

“I want information, asshole, not a vocabulary lesson!”  I
leapt over the desk to get in his face, bleeding anger, death, dismemberment, torture, and as much terror as I could force out.  “You get your shit together and answer my questions or you’re going to get hurt badly.  Not killed.  Hurt.  Baaadllly.”  Zielinski turned white, shock finally breaking through whatever crap filtered through his brain.

“Fine…” he said with a croak.  Sighed.  “A couple of pre-prints on Chimeras came through, recently.  I can try to dig them up.”

He comment satisfied me for now, save for his reactions.  I had given him everything, predator wise, more than had killed Keaton’s toy.  He barely reacted.  Asshole.  Inured to Arms.  Guess it took all types.

Zielinski slowly worked through his library, rooting through the journals and making more of a mess.  Forever and a day later he finally found what he had been looking for and tossed the article to me.

“The author says the authorities have been mislabeling Monsters with male genitalia as female since 1958,” Zielinski said.  “His evidence showing the ‘male Monsters’ are Major Transforms is that their juice counts consistently fall within a narrow range, the same range as Arms.  Monster juice counts vary over a wider range and the authorities haven’t bothered to do any Monster autopsies in a decade.”  I nodded.  Zielinski went back to searching through his crap piles and found another article twenty minutes later.

I looked the article over.  Junk.  Monsters with male genitalia spotted near Chicago, Kansas City and Minneapolis.  “Don’t you have anything better?”

He paused a beat and his stone face turned harder.  “Well, I picked up through the rumor mill that Johns Hopkins had a Chimera corpse to play with.”

“Why didn’t you mention that first?”
I asked.  He shrugged.  The bastard, playing his old games with me.  I put some predator into my gaze to get him to speed up.  This time I didn’t think he even noticed.

“Somehow, they kept the Chimera corpse out of the media,” Zielinski said.  “The people who encountered the Chimera found nothing unusual about him.  He never spoke and he didn’t act either sane or intelligent.  The police killed him, at considerable loss of life.  The Chimera was in every way a standard Monster, except for the fact he had male genitalia.  Because of the first paper I mentioned, some researchers at Johns Hopkins grabbed him for an autopsy.  The juice count on the Chimera was ninety-eight, and to their surprise, they found a metacampus, nearly a twin of the Focus metacampus.”

“More?”

Zielinski paused.  “Yes, ma’am, but only anecdotal.”

“Which you were ordered not to talk about, so don’t.”  He nodded, worried about Keaton.  Not me.  I licked my lips and thought bad thoughts, blood thoughts.  “I’d like to know more about what the scientific community knows about any similar Transform anomalies.”

“I will do so, Arm Hancock.”  He presented papers for the next three hours while I stripped his refrigerator of all edible food.  I learned a lot, but nothing I learned was directly relevant to the Monster Arms episode.

When he started to repeat himself, I threw in the towel.  “I’ve had enough of your science for one day,” I said.

He nodded and passed me a note.  “Just in case you want to call me later,” he said.  I knew the routine and made it vanish.  I couldn’t believe how pushy…

“Don’t forget, you motherfucking two legged God complex, you need enough food for two Arms when they come visiting.”  Keaton’s voice, not mine.  I practically jumped out of my skin.  I turned to where Keaton’s voice came from and found her standing in the corner of the library as if she owned the place.  I had no idea she was here, or for how long.  Keaton, damn her, was full of nasty tricks way beyond my capabilities.

Zielinski didn’t jump a bit.  Instead, he tried to ease off his stool, but Keaton moved faster.  Before he got his feet firmly planted under him, she had him by the chin.  I
relaxed.  This was the way Keaton should behave.  No hug this time.

“I’ve got an assignment for you, Hank,” Keaton said.

“From Focus…”

“Don’t interrupt,” Keaton said.  Zielinski shut up, a little more wary.  “A new job, Network approved and everything.  The pay’s miniscule, there aren’t any fringe benefits, and it’s dangerous as all get out.  Luckily for you, it’s all you’ve ever wanted in life.”  There was that damned ‘Network’ again.  I heard about it often, but Keaton refused to explain.  My muscles corded.

“I’m going to help you train Arm Hancock?” he asked, licking his lips in anticipation.

“No,” Keaton said.  “I don’t need any help with training Hancock.”  Dr.-no-longer Zielinski’s face fell.  “Hankie, old friend, you’re
working
for Hancock now.  You do whatever she wants.”

Well, that was a surprise.

“And you, ma’am?” Zielinski asked, a bit nervous-like.

“She works for me.”

Zielinski nodded.  He understood.  I found his easy acceptance of Arm psychology quite impressive, despite his most annoying arrogance.

“I’ll want a full report on everything the two of you do.  From the both of you.  They’d better match, too.”  Keaton smiled.  “Hancock, since he’s now ours, I order you to give him whatever information he asks for.  Hank?  As with my old agreement with you, you can’t publish anything you learn about Hancock.  If you breathe so much as a word about us you’ll die screaming for mercy as your body is carved away one piece at a time.  Understand?”  He nodded.  It irked him, but he nodded.

“Hancock owns you now.”  Zielinski nodded.  He understood the Arms’ concept of ownership, possibly better than I did.  “I’ve purchased your services from the Network.  Be careful of the consequences.”

Now Zielinski turned ashen.  He had held himself together for hours, but no longer.  No one faced Keaton, in a mood like this, without knowing terror down into his bones,
and whatever trick she managed involving the Network was no small part of it.  “Yes,” he barely managed to say.  “Yes, ma’am.”

I worried, all the way back to Philadelphia.  Zielinski’s note to me said, “I have a great deal of anecdotal evidence to share with you.  Come talk to me
without
Keaton.”  He knew she was present, dammit!  I needed to get him to teach me his trick.

I
was not sure if he knew exactly how much of a risk he took when he passed me the note.  Keaton couldn’t have missed it, but he implied the note contained his phone number, which Keaton already possessed.  He trusted her to not double-check, which in my mind was too large a risk.  On the other hand, he wasn’t gibbering insane already from dealing with Arms.  And, Keaton hadn’t asked to see the note.

Zielinski was used to playing with fire.

More than a year would pass before I realized exactly how hot that fire was.

Never run from an Arm.  The Arm instinctively wants to give chase, like any large vertebrate predator.  She may cry after she has run you down and killed you, and feel great remorse, but that won’t stop her from doing so in the first place.

“The Book of Arms”

“Aren’t you ever home, Zielinski?”

Zielinski jumped, his heart rapidly beating.  He looked up from his office desk and found Hancock seated across from him, a frown on her face.

“I’m sorry I missed you the first time,” he said.  She had left a note.  “I was away on Network business.”

Anger crossed the Arm’s face.  “Don’t you do anything but work?”

Ever since his personal life had cratered, black moods and painful memories had plagued him.  The only way he held them at bay was to bury himself in his work.  “I normally watch the news around dinner time,” he said.  A half million anti-war crazies, gathered in New York, march
ed on the United Nations building.  He had turned the news off.

Between blinks, Carol grabbed his paperwork.  She looked it over with a few flicks of her eyes, tossed it back to him and shook her head.  “Is this normal?”

“The Atlanta Focus who keeps growing extra fingers, or the fact she refuses to pay for the surgery?” he returned.

Hancock laughed.  “That’s the spirit,” she said.  “So, what was with the note you gave me last time?”

“I have some anecdotal information about male Major Transforms Keaton would not appreciate hearing about.”  In his mind, he still visualized her as the Carol Hancock from in the Detention Center, but in reality she had changed too much.  Almost a different person, all because of Keaton’s training.  He needed to be on his toes.

“Explain.
What’s with her distrust of anecdotal reports?”

She even sounded like Keaton now.

“Some Major Transforms, including Focuses, can mess with people’s heads, creating illusions of the unreal and covering up the true reality.  Keaton’s run into a few situations where things weren’t as they appeared to be and no longer trusts what she sees.”

“Well, that’s taking paranoia a bit far.”  Pause.  “In my not so humble opinion.”  Ah, the famous Carol Hancock humor.  He had been afraid Keaton had beaten it out of her.