Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (2 page)

They were Hunters!  Hunters
hunted
.  They were
dangerous
.

What they needed, what they all needed, was some sort of cause.  They needed enemies to fight and defeat.  If he proved himself better than Grendel while fighting their enemies, he would prove himself Grendel’s master.

The Law allowed that.

Enkidu smiled.

I drove a bright red Ford Thunderbird through the deserted streets of San Francisco, a big smile on my face.  At just past two o’clock in the morning, almost no one was out.  It had been one hell of a week.  Everything I had repressed during Keaton’s sadistic training had come roaring out like a hurricane.  I even found a kill in Oakland five days in.  To my professional embarrassment, my depredations left a trail a mile wide, but I never stayed in one place long enough for the police to catch me.

How
could I have failed to understand how wonderful it is to be an unconstrained predator?  After four months under Keaton’s brutal thumb and learning only the bare basics of how to be an Arm, finally, I had a payoff.  Pleasure arced through my body just from the thought.

Keaton
had arranged the travel and given me a hundred dollars of walk-around money.  I acquired plenty more on my own once I got here.  She had sent me to California to get the violence out of my system.  “If you’re a predator, well, expect to occasionally leave carrion behind.”

She was sooo right.

My name is Carol Hancock.  Last year I became an Arm, a Major Transform, a member of biochemically altered humanity.  A victim of Armenigar’s Syndrome, though I didn’t feel much like a victim these days.  It’s cliché, but it
had been the longest six and a half months of my life.  In my earlier life, I had never given any thought to the idea of becoming a Transform, especially a variety of Transform as rare as an Arm.  But here I was.  The authorities grabbed me and stuck me in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center just after I woke up from my transformation coma.  I got poked, prodded, experimented on and in the process learned I had left my humanity behind: to survive I had to take juice, the chemical substance that makes Transforms different, from living Transforms.  They don’t survive the process.  Neither did my naiveté.  I was helped in the Detention Center by a Dr. Henry Zielinski, a spectacularly arrogant research doctor, and by the Arm Stacy Keaton, in disguise as a noxious ass of a physical trainer.  I didn’t understand her disguise required her to be what she considered
pleasant
.

Then Dr. Zielinski got his ass fired after a new crew of FBI researchers showed up to stress test me to death.  Keaton revealed herself as an Arm but I refused to go with her.  Stupid me.  After being half tortured to death on a daily basis, I changed my mind; I found a way to befriend the Detention Center staff and send a message to Keaton for help.  She sent back ‘successfully escape and I’ll teach you’; I did so, severely wounding but not killing the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge of Torture Patrick McIntyre on the way out.

I had been under Keaton’s care ever since and I learned what the FBI did to me in the Detention Center was nothing compared to what a real master of sadism can do.  Even so, despite my suffering, Keaton’s lessons were worth every horrid thing she did to me and every horrid thing she made me do.  Survival’s funny that way.

A week ago, I had a light bulb moment: I figured out I was evil.  Yes, a pretty stupid thing to miss for someone who killed another human being every week or so just to survive, but I had invested a lot into thinking of myself as a good person.  I enjoyed the killing, too.  My transformation gave me ecstasy when I took juice, and killing became the greatest pleasure in my life.  In addition, I was aggressive, competitive, and controlling; I had a ferocious temper, and ugly things grew in the dark places of my mind, which I fervently tried to ignore. Eventually, the dissonance between my self-image and my experiences got so bad my sanity began to crack.  Not good stuff.

I
n one blood-soaked orgy of cruelty and destruction, I gave up on my delusions and accepted what I was: an evil predator.  I didn’t understand how much of my evil was from my transformation and how much was my own doing, but I didn’t care.  I accepted everything predatory, wallowed in my brutality and gloried it my savagery.  No more self-hate, no more shattering sanity.  I was a powerful dangerous predator who preyed on human beings!  It was wonderful.

God
!  We have a saying now, with the experience of many young Arms behind us – ‘There’s nothing stupider than a baby Arm’.  I should have been locked up tight in a damned cage until I grew some sense.

Instead,
Keaton, when she came home, found what I had done and sighed a sigh of profound relief.  She had been trying to rouse my beast since the start of her training.  My reward was the starter money and the permission to take a week to find myself.  One glorious week.

I had just finished a day and a half of fun with the hippies, as they called themselves, and with the tourists who came to their zoo down in the Haight.  Yes, Gray Line actually ran tourist busses down to the Haight for the show.  Simply amazing.

These innocents were such good prey, though I wished their clothing styles revealed less.  My transformation gave me a lot of enhancements, including muscles, and as
an Amazon woman, short skirts, blue jeans and I no longer got along, if we ever did.  My current preferred clothing style involved a checked poncho over an ankle-length dress.  Those huge shoulders of mine were damned hard to disguise.

I had a problem. 
A big problem.

It was time for me to go home.

I growled as I drove through the dark streets.  I didn’t want to go back to Keaton.  I loved my week of havoc, loved being strong, and free, and a predator.  I loved when people feared me.  I loved when no one beat me.  I loved freedom.

Keaton wanted me back in her den of degradation and pain.  I couldn’t even think about returning without my body shaking with remembered abuse, so I parked the car in the first parking spot I found.  I had to calm down.  I put my head in my hands and steadied my breathing.  She
had warned me back when I signed on: ‘I’m going to enjoy hurting you.’  At the time I nurtured a baseless hope she might go easier on another Arm, but it hadn’t worked out, and she realized early on I could survive things that would kill a normal.  She loved her sadism so much it turned her on, aroused her.  Worse, she was psychotic.  The cruelty appeared possibly be part of being an Arm – not a given, but at least you could make the argument.  She certainly thought cruelty was part of being an Arm, and she put work into making sure I picked up those same tastes.

She succeeded.

Sensitive readers can now go upchuck off in a corner.  Readers who believe I was some kind of saint can go off and nurture your shattered delusions.  I learned a lot from Keaton in those early months of my transformation, and her sadistic cruelty was definitely part of it.  When I accepted my being evil, I accepted the cruelty along with the rest.

I
had been naïve about a lot of things in the Detention Center, but when I recognized my decision to go with Keaton as selling my soul to the devil, I was dead on.

Keaton’s psychotic episodes, however, were another thing entirely.  When low on juice, she occasionally let her mind slip away
, and some nightmarish demon moved in.  I had survived one major episode and several minor ones, but those episodes scared the living crap out of me.

Keaton wasn’t God.  I knew enough now to vanish into the night and become someone else.  I knew the Arm basics: how to hunt down my juice, kill it, and make the dead body vanish.  I knew how to fight and kill normals.  Hell, my spree week had proved to me I could do just about anything I wanted.

It was oh so good to be an unconstrained predator.

Rage at Keaton’s psychotic breaks buried my predatory pleasure and I lost my temper.  My ride squealed out of its parking place, unbidden, in gear and my foot on the gas before I realized what I
had done. The car screeched over the curb and plowed right into the window of the tobacconist’s store.  The bumper rode over the windowsill, the car made an awful screeching and crunching noise as the bottom rode over the low brick wall under the window, and the wooden Indian fell on the hood.  The car only came to a slamming halt after the wheels hit the brick wall and I jerked forward to bang my head on the steering wheel.  I had achieved a tactical victory over the wooden Indian, but he had captured the strategic victory by taking out my car.

Damn, that was stupid.

I had gotten better at controlling my temper over the last several months, but well, I still had room for improvement.  My head was bleeding, my neck hurt, and if I wasn’t an Arm, I would probably have injuries I needed to worry about.  What’s more, I had ruined my ride.  It was going to be a bitch finding another one to steal at this time of night.  Yet another dropped breadcrumb waiting for the police to find.

Pissed, I forced the door open and pulled myself out.  As I did, I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the window I hadn’t crashed.  Damn.  I hadn’t been good looking to start with, but being an Arm didn’t improve things one bit.  My face was younger looking, yes, but I had become gaunt and fierce.  Below the neck I might pass for a man, a well built and athletically chiseled man.  The deltoids in my shoulders looked like melons and my trapezius was large enough to shingle.  My pectorals bulged out nearly as much as my now flat breasts once did, meeting in the center with a canyon that only wished it was grand.  Below, my abs were tight enough to bounce a penny.  The circumference of my calves was nearly as large as my waist had been, pre-transformation, and my biceps weren’t far behind.  Even my lower arms and hands had turned inhuman, far far beyond unfeminine, looking more like the caricature of a robot arm and hand from a bad science fiction TV show.

Keaton’s musculature, of course, made me look normal.  She thought in time my muscles would dwarf hers in size and I still hadn’t lost anywhere near as much body fat as she had.  Her skin was so thin she looked like an anatomy model.

Still, the
se changes made me angry.  The mere thought of Keaton ate at my self-control.  I sneered at the reflection, grabbed my backpack from out of the back seat and started to wipe the car for prints.  As I did, three restless natives, men in their late twenties and early thirties, ambled over.  They reeked of pot and cheap booze.

“Hey lady, need some…” the scruffiest one said, from the back.

I didn’t need this.  I turned to them and glared, letting my body stiffen and filling my mind with well-practiced predator thoughts: the stalk, the chase, the kill.  The back two turned and ran, instinctive fear.  The third, the numbass in front, stopped cold, a distant streetlight barely illuminating his dirty jacket and torn blue jeans.

“What the fuck are you?”

Dammit.  Namvet.

“Go.”  I focused my rage at Keaton and the whole damned fucking universe at him, and let my mind fill with every vile thing I
had done in the past week.  My California swath of murder and mayhem had made the national news, brought in the FBI and police from around the country, and the newspapers and criminal textbooks still reference my work as a case example of spree killing.  Yes, I was the California Spree Killer.  I’m not going to try and excuse myself.  I let my beast out completely, abandoned all restraints and indulged in every vice and evil deed I thought of.  I even broke up a Monsters Die protest in Berkeley all by my lonesome self.  Alright, I’m proud of that one.  Much of the rest of what I did I’m still embarrassed to admit to.

Mr. Half-drunk Namvet’s bladder let loose.  He turned, stumbled, slowly backed off until he found a corner to put between us
, and ran like hell.

“Fuck this,” I laughed.  I gave up on the car, backing off ten paces before I emptied a clip into the gas tank.  The car caught fire before I had a chance to toss a lit match into the leaking gasoline.

I took off down the street at a jog, flames warming my back as I ran.  I needed to be far away from here by the time the police arrived.

A mature Arm would understand instinctively my love of being a predator.  I doubt anyone else would, no matter how good the explanation.  How can I explain what it really means to be a predator?  To enjoy the kill, but not only the kill: to enjoy the hunt, the power, the helpless terror of the prey as it falls, and the feast that follows.  The freedom to do absolutely anything.

There is no greater pleasure than the juice.  Juice is the Arm’s life; she can’t live without juice and the only way an Arm can get juice is to take juice from Transforms.  An Arm can’t help but love taking juice and everything associated with the taking, including the hunt and the kill.  It’s natural for an Arm to be a predator and it’s natural for an Arm to enjoy being one.

I denied everything at first.  I did everything possible to lock away the terrible, cruel predator within me and lock the beast inside.  I chained up the instincts my transformation gave me like a child who tries to deny the dangerous urges of puberty.  I told myself I was demon possessed and invented irrational supernatural explanations for every change I went through.