Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (14 page)

This must be the Chimera he had helped capture.

“Rrr…  Rover?” Dr. Zielinski said.

“That’s me,” the Chimera said.  “You have a lot of good loving in you.”  The creature sounded barely half-awake or mentally damaged in some way.  It slurred its words but still spoke better than he believed possible.  “I want good loving.”

Dr. Zielinski tried to back the wheelchair away, but the Chimera moved on him with a pounce, grabbed him in its arms and lifted him, holding him against the creature’s huge erection.

“Don’t struggle,” the Chimera said.

Dr. Zielinski didn’t have much struggle left in him, anyway, given the poison of the juice.  The Chimera held Dr. Zielinski up against his furry body with a tight hug and howled in pleasure.  He took something from Dr. Zielinski, the taking more painful than the Chimera’s squeeze.  The world blackened yet again.

Rover’s howls faded to whimpers.  The Chimera thrashed against him and Dr. Zielinski’s right leg grew damp.  In a moment, Rover slowly collapsed to the floor, still holding Dr. Zielinski tight against him.  In another moment, Rover snored.

“Good,” Occum said from above where Dr. Zielinski lay on the sleeping Chimera.  “I’d hoped you had a large enough dose of Monster juice to satisfy Rover and not too large for him to slip my control.  If not, he would have ripped you to shreds.  How’n the hell did you get that crap inside you, anyway?  Experimentation with Monster juice isn’t healthy.”

“Assassination attempt.”

“Assassination attempt!  God dammit, no wonder Gymnast was being so cagy,” Occum said.  “Last thing I need is to get involved in some damned political mess.”

“Thank you, sir, for your help,” Dr. Zielinski said.  Lori had said the Crows were standoffish; he was surprised this Crow had been willing to help.  Occum deserved all the politeness Dr. Zielinski could offer.

“Well, hell…”  Pause.  “You’re welcome,” Occum said, in an ‘aw shucks’ voice.  “Can you get up and walk?”

“I’m stuck,” Dr. Zielinski said.  He still felt weak; the dim light in the room was still too bright.

Occum lifted the Chimera’s arms off him, lifted him off the Chimera and back into the wheelchair.  Dr. Zielinski’s right arm dropped on his right leg, right into a familiar smelling wetness, which the clinical part of his mind recognized as ‘male ejaculate, about one pint’.  “Yuck!”

“Rover’s quite the animal, isn’t he?”
Occum chuckled as he wrapped the torn sheet over Dr. Zielinski’s eyes again.  “Back to my place.”

The trip up the stairs from the basement was still quite dizzying.  Dr. Zielinski tried not to be sick on the trip back to Occum’s apartment and on the return trip up a long flight of steep wooden stairs (backwards, still sitting in the wheelchair with the bent axel and one out-of-round wheel).

Back in the dark room above the pizza parlor, his benefactor lifted him off the wheelchair and laid him on the mattress, carefully on his back.  “Sleep, Dr. Zielinski.  Sleep.  Now that Rover’s cleaned the Monster juice out of you, I’ll be able to clean the remaining dross out of you in a few hours.”

Dross is certainly a funny name for jism, Dr. Zielinski thought to himself as he dropped back asleep.

This time he awoke in a bright sunlit empty room, to the sound of an old wooden door opening.  Yet another location, this one with the mothball smell of a dry cleaners in his nose.

Focus Rizzari stalked into the room behind two bodyguards, trailed by two others.  No Occum.  Of all things, Dr. Zielinski’s stomach grumbled with hunger.  “Grab him,” Focus Rizzari said, to her bodyguards.  “Let’s get out of here.”  They grabbed, his feet scrabbling on the floor.  “You conscious?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“Good,” Focus Rizzari said.  “We’ve a lot to talk about.  Whatever Occum did fixed you and I want to know how he did it.”  He nodded again, still not able to talk.

Two of the bodyguards led him out the door, down a set of rickety stairs, and outside.

Waiting beside one of Focus Rizzari’s two cars, weapons drawn on a grumpy looking Ann Chiron, were three FBI agents.  Special Agent McIntyre stood pale and unsteady in front, angry and annoyed.  Behind him, Dr. Zielinski caught a quite unladylike set of curses from one of Focus Rizzari’s female bodyguards, surprised at the appearance of the FBI.

Agent McIntyre fixed Dr. Zielinski with his gaze, then dropped his gaze to the immense semen stain on Zielinski’s pants and smiled.  “You have the right…”

“I’d like to speak to my attorney, now,” Dr. Zielinski said, his voice raw and painful.  He had expected this moment ever since Hancock’s escape.  His arrest couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time.

“…out on probation.  The nonsense is, of course, what got me fired.”

Carol shook her head.  She listened to him with full Arm attention.  She even had a bit of concern on her face when he described the assassination attempt.  Oh, and total anger when he mentioned Special Agent McIntyre.

“So, beyond the fact Rover was addled enough to mistake your leg for a woman, what’s your personal opinion of the male Major Transforms you met?” Carol said, eventually, her mouth slightly turned up at her own wit.

“Personal opinion?”  Zielinski took a deep breath and marshaled his thoughts.  “Rover was little more than an animal, a retarded child with the body of a Monster.  Occum was quite intelligent, fast on his feet, and polite for someone so anti-social.  A polite grouch.”  A sudden image came to him, of Arms as the inverse of Crows, impolite but social.

“I have something for you in trade,” Carol said.  “A small anecdotal adventure of my own.”

She told him an incredible story of an abandoned farmhouse encounter with nine Monsters and two Transforms.  “In any event, the free Monster fled, screaming for help at the top of her lungs.  We…”

“Screaming for help?” Zielinski said, interrupting.  “I’ve never heard of a talking Monster before
.  Or one who could do housework.  The possibilities…”

Carol interrupted him with a faux cough.  “Am I telling this story, or are you?”  Zielinski covered his mouth sheepishly.  Carol continued, recounting the gory details.  “We never saw the Chimeras,” she concluded, “but we smelled them.  There were two of them.”

Zielinski put down his note pad and took a deep breath.  “I’ve never encountered anything remotely like this before.  That’s amazing.”  Zielinski paused, and wrote.  Carol didn’t say any more.  “Any idea how long they had been there?”

“Weeks, perhaps months.  What does it mean?”

“Well, from my encounter in Boston, we know Chimeras can feed on Monster juice and they don’t have to kill to take it,” Zielinski said.  “Your encounter hints that Chimeras actually prefer Monster juice, they hunt for new women Transforms, let them go Monster and that some of them have learned to keep their prey alive afterwards as part-Monsters.  I don’t have to tell you how big an advantage such a trick gives the Chimeras over Arms.”

“Keaton noticed several different sizes of footprints around the house with the same scent,” Carol said.  “Can Chimeras change shape?  How quickly?”

Zielinski closed his eyes in thought.  “It takes months for a new Monster to change from human to her true Monster form and years for the last human vestiges to vanish.  Simple physics and chemistry argues against any quick changes.  My anecdotal encounter and some leading questions to Focus Rizzari hints that Chimeras can change much more quickly than a woman Transform who’s turned Monster.  In specific, Focus Rizzari described Rover as a pony sized dog before his capture, while my juice-addled memory of Rover is of a seven-foot tall werewolf able to walk on two legs.  Given a Major Transform’s supercharged metabolism and unlimited food, water and juice, I would guess fast shape changes are at least theoretically possible.  Whether it takes days or weeks is something we need real data to determine.  I wouldn’t expect minutes or hours, though.”

“Just fucking great,” Carol said.  “Thanks, Hank.”  She smiled and took in the messy ambience of his office.  “Just don’t forget you work for us Arms, not this Focus Rizzari.”

“Of course,” Zielinski said.

“Oh, and the Transform from the basement of Monster Arms provided me with the worst juice I’ve ever
taken.  I swear it made me itch.  Could it have been contaminated?”

“Let me take some blood samples and we’ll see.”  Hank smiled.  Back to work, on his favorite project of all.

---

“Incredible,” Lori said, sipping coffee, after Zielinski relayed Carol’s story.  “Occum isn’t the only one experimenting on Chimeras, is he?”

Zielinski nodded.  He had visited Focus Rizzari’s Focus household several times after his juice poisoning, the first visit to apologize for his behavior while juice poisoned.  Her household exceeded his expectations, something new and different, and wonderful.  “This information needs to get passed on to the Focus Council.  With the Arm stuff filtered out.”  Information trading served as one of the bedrocks of the Focus Network economy.

“Hey!  I’m not a Network top honcho, Henry.  I’m just a regional VP,” Lori said.  “Don’t expect me to present
this
story to the Council.”

“Why not?” Zielinski asked, annoyed.  “Isn’t passing on information part of your job?”  He often had to remind himself that Lori was a Focus; she didn’t seem to take her Focus duties seriously.  It didn’t help that she wore the most absurd Focus outfit he had ever seen, matching off-white tennis shorts and halter top.  He couldn’t remember ever seeing a Focus’s belly button outside of an examination room.  She looked like she just stepped out of a shower.

Zielinski covered his annoyance by sipping on orange juice and looking around.  Ten in the morning and the kitchen still buzzed with activity; it made him wonder if anyone in this household held a proper job.  He and the Focus sat in a small three-table nook just off the kitchen, and they had both served themselves.  Not only did the Focus’s people not fawn over her, they barely registered her existence.

Lori waved her hands.  “Tonya’s given me enough grief over this already.  You tell her.”  He shrugged.  Telling Tonya, who professed not to believe in the existence of male Major Transforms, would be a waste of his time.  “So, Henry, what have you been up to in the past few months?  Did you get to keep your house?”  Lori wanted him to move into her household.  He was tempted; he wouldn’t be the first non-Transform non-spouse to move in.  He shared the household’s cause – save the world from Transform Sickness – but he didn’t trust his emotions, fearing the real reason he gave any thought to moving in was the fact he had fallen for Lori.

He nodded in answer to her question.  “The divorce is final and I kept the house.”  Only after a raid on his nearly depleted offshore money stash, though.  “I’ve been doing Network business, or at least until the Arms showed up back in my life.  The itinerant Network doctor routine.”

“You’re still welcome to use my Boston College lab,” Lori said.  He currently stored his research papers and his works in progress in her lab.  “Come on over today.  I teach classes all afternoon, and you’ll have the place to yourself.”

“I think I’m going to take you up on your offer,” he said, glad to receive the Focus’s invitation again.  He had tests to run on Carol’s blood.

“Great!  So your ex-officio Network doctoring’s mostly Transform Dystrophy and cancer work?” Lori asked.

“Yes,” he said.  Transforms didn’t often catch normal diseases.  However, they did get injured, fall victim to cancer, and at times developed a nasty auto-immune disorder called the Transform Dystrophy.

“Any progress on either?”  About ten minutes ago, one of Focus Rizzari’s women Transforms sat herself down at the next table over in the nook, blatantly eavesdropping on them.  Zielinski didn’t know what, if anything, he should do about it.

“Little.  I’ve become convinced Major Transforms are immune to the dystrophy; I managed to cadge some records on the disease from Focus Ackermann, enough for a good statistical sampling.”  Epidemiology was his second specialty.  “Statistically, there’s about a ninety-seven percent chance I’m right.”  Good enough numbers for a working hypothesis, but not enough to publish.  “The cancers?  Nothing.”

“So they have you doing surgery?”

He nodded.  Surgery was his first specialty.  Transform cancers didn’t progress in a normal fashion.  No Focus with cancer had died from it, yet, just men and woman Transforms.  On the other hand, tumors in a Focus with cancer spread like a plague, often to where she needed surgery, on a monthly basis, to remove another twenty-five percent of her body weight in tumors.

“I’m hoping my Network contacts can get me back into the research business,” he said.  “Not yet, though.”  He glared at the back of the head of the eavesdropping woman Transform and finally recognized her: Ann Chiron, the career-shortened anthropologist, a co-author of the myth hypothesis.  She had died her hair blonde, cut it short and pixie style and changed her wardrobe to match.  He couldn’t get too upset at Ann’s eavesdropping.  He half expected eavesdropping was in her job description.

They called the place Inferno.  He couldn’t disagree.

He sighed, and went after a doughnut and took a bite.  “What’s in this?” he asked, after he barely choked down the bit of doughnut.