Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (18 page)

I expected Keaton to give chase.  Instead, she turned to me, and her dark glance told me to get the body disposal equipment ready.  I snuck a peek past the dividers at Keaton, and she didn’t do at all what I expected.  She simply walked out the door, not bothering with any weapons.  Fouke fell without a fight, or even any gunshots.  A moment passed before Keaton dragged Fouke’s body back in; with my metasense addled from the Monster juice I couldn’t tell what was going on, save something bad had happened to Fouke.  I assumed the next step would be a lengthy torture session ending in Fouke’s death.  Normally I would care, but at that moment I was pissed.  This bitch Arm had picked up the ability to burn juice virtually on day one and I still didn’t know how.  Definitely not fair.

My anger turned out to be a waste.  Mary was already quite dead, reduced to little more than a steaming skeleton.  Keaton hadn’t laid a hand upon her.  Instead, Mary burned
out her own juice.  Bloody cinders of flesh flaked off her.  My stomach churned in disgust.

“I didn’t think an Arm could do that,” I said.  Burning juice was supposed to be an Arm’s big secret edge.  Dangerous as all get-out, because of the amount of juice you used, but in an emergency?  Priceless.

“Can’t happen to an older Arm,” Keaton said.  “Guess the rules are different for baby Arms.  I think you got lucky, scag.”

A foul odor of bad juice wafted over to me from Mary’s corpse (and, I would later find, from a spot in the street that never seemed to go away).  I gagged and threw up, not even bothering to dive for the bathroom.  Keaton turned and heaved, herself, after I did.

“Fucking idiot.  Don’t do shit like that,” she said.  “What the fuck have you been doing for the last five days, anyway?  This place is a pigsty.  Don’t you ever do anything around here but lie around on your lazy ass? Chop up dipshit here into disposable pieces and clean this fucking place up.”

She snarled obscenities as she stalked off, but on the way out, I caught one last terrifying glance back at me.  She had the Uncle Herbie look, the clinical, dispassionate way my Uncle Herbie gazed at a calf before the slaughter, an expression I hadn’t seen from Keaton since we brought my muscle growth under control.  Keaton expected me to die.  The same way Fouke died.

Keaton waited until I finished my cleaning before she let out all her psychotic frustrations and beat the snot out of me for being stupid enough to draw from a Monster.  After she finished the beating, still in the grip of her mad, psychotic rage, she cut my throat.

“You expect dross?” Midgard asked, and put down his pen.  He was a black Crow, tall and thin, and wrote with a beautiful cursive script.  He had convinced Gilgamesh to exchange addresses with him, for letters.  In payment, Gilgamesh had passed along Sinclair’s PO box number.

A couple of minutes ago, they
had metasensed Hancock’s arrival back in town.  Gilgamesh immediately headed toward the Arm’s lair, and Midgard followed.  He had been in town all day with something on his mind, but silence surrounded him like a caul.

“Whenever the two Arms spend any time apart from each other, there’s dross when they come back together,” Gilgamesh said
as they headed down the stairs of the apartment building.  “Keaton will make sure.”

“You refer to her by her real name, now?”

“It helps me remember they’re Major Transforms like us, not goddesses.”  The other Crows also wound their way toward the Arm’s lair, though both Sinclair and Wire were absent today.  Wire was off getting some sort of lesson from Thomas the Dreamer, and Sinclair…  Gilgamesh didn’t know where Sinclair was, but the older Crow had said he needed to do some mundane business.  Gilgamesh suspected Sinclair couldn’t keep himself from wandering.  He hoped his old and new friend would return once he finished his ‘business’.

“Even after what Tiamat did out in California?”  The Crow consensus on the letter writing circuit pegged Hancock as the California Spree Killer.  “What she did strikes me as rather goddess-like.”
  They exited the building onto the sidewalk, two ordinary men notable only because one was black and one white, walking in the spring sunshine.

“You haven’t seen how she acts around Keaton.  Whipped puppy dogs have more pride.”

Hancock must have gotten a taxi, Gilgamesh decided.  He barely metasensed her as she sped away from the airport, a sure sign she was in a car.  Something was wrong with her, though, but he couldn’t tell what.  The Arm exited the taxi about three quarters of a mile from Keaton’s place and started to limp home.  While the Arm walked, all the Crows froze in position.  None of them knew the metasense range of an Arm and none of them wanted to find out the hard way.  However, immobile Crows were almost impossible to metasense, even by other Crows.  More, Wire had taught Gilgamesh some mental tricks that supposedly made him even more hidden.  Midgard and Gilgamesh found themselves near the rear entrance of Philadelphia Metalworking, a small operation at the edge of the warehouse district.  Gilgamesh hoped none of the workers inside would come up with a need for a smoke break.  His and Midgard’s immobile presence would be hard to explain.

A few minutes after Hancock’s return the baby Arm tried to escape, using an Arm trick Gilgamesh had never seen Hancock use.  Only the baby Arm messed the trick up somehow and died in a dross explosion.

“What was that?” Midgard asked, a marked quaver in his voice.

“I metasensed Keaton do this in St. Louis,” Gilgamesh said, his voice a very quiet whisper.  “Wire says the Arms have the ability to burn juice for extra energy and speed.”

Gilgamesh metasensed Keaton’s repressed anger, a pleasant surprise.  Wire and Sinclair often mentioned their ability to metasense emotions.  With a little thought and study, Gilgamesh realized his metasense didn’t pick up emotion directly.  He read the emotions off her glow.

Hancock cleaned up the mess, but all the while Keaton’s anger grew.  Keaton’s anger soon exploded, and she attacked Hancock.  Neither held back in the fight, the first time Gilgamesh had seen Hancock go all out since his arrival in Philadelphia.  The combat was simply amazing.  Neither of them spent much time on the ground.  They fought with knives and their limbs moved too fast for Gilgamesh to follow.  “Keaton’s holding back,” Gilgamesh said.  He couldn’t metasense this and not be awed.  “She’s toying with H…Tiamat.”

Okay, okay, they
were
goddesses.  He wouldn’t last a second fighting either of them.  In theory, Gilgamesh knew his transformation would let him outfight any normal human man save an athlete or athletic soldier.  Of course, he would run first, but that wasn’t his point.  No, both Arms fought at a level he couldn’t describe as anything but superhuman.

The fight ended with the Skinner on Tiamat’s back, a knife to her throat.

While the Arms talked, Midgard began to sob.

“They’re all insane with violence, all these predators,” Midgard said.  “This is too much like what happened in Boston, the reason I came down here to talk to you.”

“They are what they are,” Gilgamesh said.  He found it hard not to condone their actions.  “What happened in Boston?”

“Jeremy Hoskins, the Beast Man who once was named Crab Guy but didn’t like the name, had some sort of turf fight with Rover, like two animals trying to establish dominance on the other.  Hoskins won and Rover now takes his orders.  Afterwards, Hoskins killed Shere Khan.  No warning, no nothing.  He just upped and did it.  Shredded Shere Khan into slivers.”

Gilgamesh hissed.  “What happened to Occum?”

Midgard gathered himself.  “Hoskins said he killed Shere Khan to protect Occum.  Occum couldn’t stop him, either.  Insane. 
The predators are all insane!
”  Midgard inhaled a hissed breath.  “Just look at these two idiots and their fight!  It’s all the same.  They’re all Monsters!”

“Did this Hoskins Beast Man state a reason?”  Gilgamesh didn’t understand his own reaction to the Skinner and Tiamat’s fight; something about their fight warmed his heart.  More than
that, the fight sexually aroused him.  He had lost his respect for the beaten-down Tiamat, but this fight regenerated his respect.  He could metasense Tiamat fight like this all day long.  The fight itself was a thing of beauty.

He also wanted Tiamat to kick the Skinner’s ass into the next county.

“Jeremy said there wasn’t anything human left in Shere Khan’s mind,” Midgard said.  If anything, Midgard looked like he had picked up the twitchies.  About Gilgamesh.  “He said Shere Khan was a danger to them, that he didn’t have any choice.”

“The Skinner didn’t kill Tiamat, Midgard.  This is different, Arms are different,” Gilgamesh said, his first realization.  He didn’t say the other, that he didn’t think either of them had any choice in
this
fight.  The battle had to happen.  Foreordained.  Destiny.  Mystical crap beyond his understanding, and thus worthy of awe and worship.

“I’m not so sure it’s over,” Midgard said.  “Something’s wrong with the Skinner’s mind.”

Two minutes later, the Skinner proved Midgard right.  She fell into one of her incredible psychotic rages, slit Tiamat’s throat, picked up the younger Arm and tossed her half way across the warehouse.  Dross flooded out from Tiamat and tears leaked down Gilgamesh’s cheek.

Arms are territorial.  Very territorial.  They may claim possessions and people – who, when dealing with an Arm, has not been told, “You are mine!” by the Arm – but what
she really means is, “When you are in my territory, you will do as I say.”  The Arm is actually less motivated by money and physical possessions than a normal person.  The territory she claims is her hunting territory, which in a more enlightened Arm will also include responsibility for protecting her friends who live in the area.

“The Book of Arms”

“So can either of you explain to me why you considered your personal dispute to be more important than the wellbeing of the household?”  Tonya glared at the two entirely intimidated women in front of her.  Neither answered.

“Well?  I’m waiting,” she said.  Beside her, Marty, her household chief of finance, added his glare to hers.  In the distance, the phone rang.  Tonya ignored it.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Janet said, woefully eyeing her shoes.  “I didn’t realize we were hurting the household.  You know I would never hurt the household.”  Paula muttered abashed agreement.  The two of them shared kitchen responsibilities.  Janet took care of breakfast and lunch, while Paula was responsible for dinner.  A month ago, they had started feuding.  Stupid, really, the minor abrasions of people who lived too close to each other.  Paula wanted to do fancier dinners and wanted additional preparation time, earlier in the afternoon.  The dinner cooks ended up starting their work while the last of the lunch cleanup crew still cleaned, in a kitchen too small to hold both crews.  Tempers briefly flared and mostly settled again, but the two chief cooks no longer cooperated.

Tonya nodded at Marty, who opened up the household account books.  “For the month of March,” he said, “the entire food expenditure for the household was $3,776.22.  Last month, the food expenditure was $3,841.98.  The two of you have spent $1,835.19 this month, so far.  At the current rate you’re spending money we’ll have spent over $4,000 by the end of the month.”

The two meal managers no longer combined their purchases.  Since the limited household pantry hadn’t grown any larger, the two of them were individually paying higher prices for smaller quantities.  They should have been buying in bulk.

Tonya let the two women think Marty spotted the issue, but in truth Marty likely wouldn’t have spotted the problem until after the end of the month.  Delia Vinote, on the breakfast crew, had come quietly to Tonya’s office in the morning to fill her in.

Delia didn’t have much responsibility in the household because of her newness, but Tonya was impressed with her.  Tonya did not intend to let her two cooks know Delia had ratted them out.

“Tonya!”  Tonya turned to find Rhonda Ebbs standing in the kitchen doorway with a tense expression on her face.

All thoughts of petty feuds and minor financial waste fled Tonya’s mind.  Tonya recognized the tightly controlled panic: a phone call from Keaton.

The damned Arm hadn’t been willing to talk for over two weeks, except for a preemptory chit-cashing, resulting in a no-hope Clinic Transform delivered to a vacant lot in Baltimore.  Something had Keaton’s panties in a twist, likely Hancock.  Tonya shuddered to think of what might be going on with those two lunatic Arms, with no one for company except each other.

Tonya hurried out of the kitchen to her office, bypassing the phone in the hallway.  She didn’t take calls from Keaton in public.

Rhonda and Marty followed, hurrying to keep up.  “Ma’am, Tonya!” Rhonda said.  “It’s your cat.”

Tonya stopped.  “My cat?”

Rhonda nodded.  She still had a pale, stressed look to her.  “Yes, ma’am.”

“All this panic?  For my
cat
?”

“Ma’am,” Rhonda said.  She handed Tonya the phone.  “Listen.  Please.”

The cat lay on the pavement two blocks from the turn-of-the-century estate Tonya’s household had converted into apartments.  Right in front of a closed doughnut shop, and two doors down from the corner market.  Blood pooled around the cat from what appeared to be a knife wound through Stalker’s stomach.  Someone had smeared the blood into odd-looking patterns, for some incomprehensible reason.

Blood matted Stalker’s gray coat.  His eyes were open, sightlessly searching for whatever reprehensible scum would do such a thing to a cat.  Tonya had a momentary, bloodthirsty urge to hire Keaton to punish the cat’s killer.  Solve two problems at once: re-establish contact with Keaton, and give the piece of scum what he deserved.

“What happened here, Maggie?”  Tonya asked.

Maggie worked her nurse job from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., came home, and, three nights a week, helped cook dinner.  She held up two gallons of milk.  “We needed a little extra milk for dinner, so Paula sent me out to get more.”  Two gallons of milk at the local market cost almost a dollar more than the same amount of milk at Tonya’s wholesale distributor. 
Damn
those two cooks of hers for not cooperating!  “I found Stalker here when I came out, and recognized him.”

“He wasn’t here when you went into the store?”

“No, ma’am.”  The bodyguards around Tonya became more alert.  She brought four of them with her for the occasion, besides Rhonda and Marty.

“Ma’am,” Rhonda said.  “Look at the streaks.”  She pointed.  “They look like letters.  ‘M’, ‘o’, ‘n’, then it trails off
.”

“‘Monsters Die’,” Marty said, finishing the abbreviated word.  “Writing in blood on the sidewalk turned out to be harder than they anticipated.”

Anger made the blood pound in Tonya’s ears.  She carefully monitored her household’s juice count, so her anger didn’t give them juice troubles.  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flicker of movement.  Fast, jerky, in the wrong place.  “There!”  She pointed.

Danny and Greg took off at a sprint.  Two boys sprinted out of the entryway of the appliance store across the street, right where she
had caught the flicker of motion.  They didn’t get ten yards before Danny and Greg ran them down.

Two boys.  They weren’t older than fifteen.  Blood soak
ed one leg of one boy’s pants, and bloody handprints covered his shirt, where he had futilely tried to wipe his hands clean.  The other, the more cautious one, or the more squeamish, showed only a faint splatter pattern of blood on the bottom of his pants.

Danny and Greg brought the two boys back to Tonya.

“Don’t you Transform monsters fuck with me!” the bloody one said, voice high.  “I have friends in this town!  You’re going to be in big trouble if you fuck with me!”

The door of the corner market opened and the proprietor, Oscar Shapiro, came out to look at the ruckus.  He saw Tonya and her people, who were good customers, but he also saw two young boys held by two intimidating older men.  He frowned.

Several other people came out to look at the confrontation, gathering as a crowd.  They weren’t angry yet, but prejudice against Transforms always ran barely beneath the surface and it wouldn’t take much for things to turn ugly.

“That’s Larry Bolander and Feebie Jackson,” an elderly man who came out of the butcher
shop said.  He had the same uneasy frown as Oscar Shapiro.

“It’s all right, folks,” Tonya said to the gathering crowd, lacing her voice with a subtle, calming charisma.  “These two killed my cat.  I’m not going to hurt them, but I do want to talk to them for a few minutes, so they understand they can’t be killing innocent creatures for fun.”  Stalker was an old tom and hardly innocent, but that was beside the point.

“You ought to do more than talk to them, Focus,” the owner of the appliance store said.  He was a big, balding man, with arms as big around as footballs from hauling heavy appliances.  “Those two painted cuss-words all over my windows last summer.”

Well.  So sentiment didn’t necessarily favor the local kids.  Tonya still doubted the crowd would stand for it if she did something harsh, despite the aggressive words.

On the other hand, there were flavors of harsh.  “Come here, boys,” she said.  Her voice was gentle, but even so, the cautious one began to shiver.

She talked to the boys, a gentle and reasoned talk, yet
well-seasoned with the harshest kind of charisma.  Those two boys would have nightmares for months.  They would never again hurt a cat, or dream of playing games with Transforms.

Keaton would have approved.

---

Keaton did call, but not until after eleven at night.

“She’s dead, Tonya,” Keaton said, when Tonya picked up the pay phone on the third ring, after having to run to grab it.  Keaton disguised her voice as a South Philly thug, but Tonya recognized it anyway.

“You killed Hancock?”  Tonya swore to herself
as she closed the door of the phone booth behind her, shutting out the noise of the few late night Kroger customers.  The Focuses needed a second Arm!

“No, not Hancock, Fouke,” Keaton said.

Tonya got edgy; her question invited insults and profanity, but Keaton hadn’t bit.  “And no, I didn’t kill Fouke.  She found a novel way to kill herself.”

Ah.  “So that was you who got Fouke from Annapolis.  The report I read had it as a couple of men dressed as
Swiss army officers.”

“You know better than to believe newspaper reports.”

Tonya took a deep breath.  Still no insults.  “I’d heard Focus Teas’ license-stripped pet doctor, Stewart, expressed some interest in this Mary Fouke Arm.”

“Yah, and I thought about selling her to him,” Keaton said.  “Changed my mind.”

The surreal nature of the conversation made Tonya shiver.

“So, Stacy, why did you call now?” Tonya asked.

Keaton paused before answering, very unlike her.  “There’s a problem, Tonya, and I wondered if you had any insights.”

Polite!  Keaton was actually being polite!  Tonya savored the moment.  Keaton rarely asked her for favors.  “What sort of problem?”

“It turns out Arms don’t naturally get along with each other.  I could ignore the fact Hancock and I don’t get along well, and attribute it to personality issues, but Fouke and I didn’t get along
and
Hancock and Fouke didn’t get along.”  Keaton paused again.  “I’m no longer convinced that Arms can train other Arms.”

“Give Hancock to me,” Tonya said, the obvious answer.  “I’ll front for you and teach her whatever you want me to.”  Plus some extra.  Heh and heh.

“Sure.  Hope you don’t mind losing about one Transform a month.”

Tonya
froze.  “You’re saying that Hancock doesn’t have the control to keep from killing a Focus’s Transforms?”  Damn!  Tonya fervently wished she knew more about young Arms.  They sounded nearly as messed up as young Focuses.

“Tonya, Hancock recently screwed up, big time, and ended up involuntarily drawing juice from a baby Monster.”  Tonya winced.  “She’s still a
young
Arm.  I suppose you could raid clinics for rejects and keep some extras as an emergency supply…”

“I’ll pass on the teaching offer, Stacy,” Tonya said.  She might be a bitch and a half, with a cast iron stomach, but she suspected she couldn’t handle
that
, and if she tried, her household would revolt.

“So, what am I going to do?”  Keaton asked, still uncharacteristically polite.  “I suppose I could just kill Hancock and get this over with.  At some point I’m going to slip and kill her, you know.  I almost did tonight, because my stupid student came back to
my
place reeking of the Monster she drew from.  She’s not making any progress on her graduation.  I’m not even sure she’s trying.”

Tonya knew about Keaton’s psychotic episodes, supposedly brought on by severe abuse she
had suffered while in the hands of the FBI.  Tonya had witnessed the carnage of two of them.  “Let her go.”

“No, dammit, she’s
mine
!”  Startled by Keaton’s sudden change of volume and demeanor, Tonya nearly dropped the phone.  “Don’t you dare say a thing, bitch.  I might’ve been thinking about selling Fouke to Doc Stewart for the hundred grand he was offering, but even so, I’m not sure I could have pulled it off.  She was mine,
too
, bitch.”

Oh, hell.  The Hancock problem had Keaton spooked.  Now that
Keaton had revealed her problem, the Arm reverted to her normal profane and insulting self.  “Tell me if I’ve got this straight,” Tonya said.  “Your Arm possessiveness extends to other Arms under your control, but on the other hand, Arms don’t get along with each other.  You didn’t have that reaction when I offered to take Hancock.”

“Uh huh, because you’re
my Focus
, Tonya,” Keaton said, her voice sugary and lusty.  Tonya shivered and it took all her willpower not to flee from the phone booth.  She didn’t want to face that ugly reality today.

She also didn’t argue the subject.

“Do you think you might be able to use your fancy Focus charisma on Hancock to get her to behave?  I’m tired of fighting the fucking twat every fucking day.  I swear, everything she does gets on my nerves…and you know what that means.”