Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (20 page)

“I wondered.  The style of carnage suggested our friends the Chimeras,” he said.  “More pain, deeper.”

“Fuck.  I’m getting real tired of those boys.”

Zielinski showed her a clamp, and when she didn’t object, clamped the incision open.

“You fear they’re besmirching your Arms’ fine reputation, ma’am?”

“Fuck you,” Carol said, biting the leather harder as he cut deeper.  “If the reports were right, they ate part of their victims.  That’s beyond besmirching, that’s flat out disgusting.”

“True, true.”  He used two more clamps.  “I’m ready to extract the bullet,” he said, a long-necked pair of forceps in his hands.  “No need for the hammer and chisel, but the pain will still be momentarily excessive.”

Carol yowled into the leather as he finished.  “Nine!” she said, mid yowl.

Zielinski just wrinkled his forehead, puzzled, and soldiered on.

“There.  All sewn up.  A week from now, ma’am, all you’ll have left is a faint scar.”

Carol nodded and slowly sat up
, leaning to the ease pressure on her wound.  “So, why’d you go all formal on me now?”

“You’re stressed.  I can smell the juice.”

“Huh.”  Just like Keaton.  She did him a little smile after she said it, though, cuing him that she yanked his chain.  “Go on, ask your questions and take your samples.  I won’t bite and I know how curious you get about Arms when you’re in a medical, well, almost laboratory.”  She waved her arms around at Hesrith’s excuse for an operating chamber.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Zielinski said, polite as he could be.  He asked quite a few questions about her training, and how much she was eating, taking notes the entire while.  He took more blood samples, urine samples and measurements.  In the month since he last saw her in person, Carol appeared to finally validate his prediction she would end up more muscular than Keaton.

“Those aren’t good questions,” she said, many minutes later.  He picked up mild exasperation from her.

“How so?”

“You don’t seem to understand how much the juice affects everything or the real dangers in my life.”

“You could just tell me.”  She frowned.  “I do know more than you think, although much of what I understand is from a Focus’s point of view.”

She told him stories of how juice affected her and Keaton’s mood and their elaborate games to fool the authorities.  He told her all Transforms had memory problems when their juice got low, what little he knew about the West German Arm, Erica Eissler, and the intensely pleasurable stimulation maximum juice amount for men and women Transforms, a pale echo of her own post-draw pleasures.

“One other thing, ma’am,” he said.  “I am acquainted with a Focus, a Professor Lorraine Rizzari, who collects anecdotal information on male Major Transforms.  She’s expressed an interest in talking to you.”

“A Professor?  The Focus Rizzari person you mentioned before is a
Professor
?”

He nodded.  “Microbiology and the physiology of Transforms.  Boston College,” Zielinski said.  “I think you would get along with her quite well.”

Carol shook her head.  “Later.  The last thing I need in my life right now is any involvement with Focuses.  I have too many complications already.  I’ll take her phone number, though.”

Zielinski smiled, having planted the seed he wanted planted.

Tonya tossed the newspaper on the floor and ignored the lurid headlines.  Dialed her message lady and left an emergency message and the phone number.  To her surprise, she got a call back within two hours.

“Tell me it’s not you,” Tonya said.  First had been a Clinic massacre in Chicago.  Now another Clinic massacre, this time in Youngstown.

“It’s not me.”  Pause.  “While you were away I stole your kitchen and neutered your guard dogs.”

Keaton’s brand of humor.  “Well, someone’s killed enough people in Ohio to give you competition.”

“Tell me about it,” Keaton said, deadpan.  “I don’t have a clue what’s going on.  So, you finish breaking your newest problem Transform?”

“She doesn’t need breaking, she needs a top end psychiatrist and fifty points of IQ.”  Tonya paused while Keaton chuckled.  “I gave some thought to
your ongoing problem with Hancock.”

“You came up with a bright idea?”

“Uh huh.  Give her some territory of her own.”

“Territory?  ‘Territory’ is just an expression I use.  It isn’t real,” Keaton said.

“The same way hunt, predator and prey aren’t real?  Staceeee…”

“Fuuuuck me.”  A resigned ‘fuuuuck me’.

“I talked to the experts,” meaning Lori Rizzari and her anthropologist Transform Ann, a long and drawn out session where she suffered through their babbling about goofy Lori-land ideas for hours and pretended to take all their ideas seriously.  Territory turned out to be one of the
less
goofy ideas they spouted, “and they think Arms will need their own territories.”

“I hate to admit it, Tonya, but that fits.  Damn.  Perhaps the reason I want to carve
her up all the time is because she’s poaching my territory.  What a royal fucking pain.”  Pause.  “Like I said before, if this works I’ll owe you one.”

“Fine,” Tonya said.  “You should consider letting her go.  You’ll feel better about yourself.  I mean, what did she do to deserve…”

“Deserve what, bitch?” Keaton said.  The call was long distance, and from the sound of it, from a suburban setting as well.  Complete with lawnmowers and the distant sounds of children playing.  “Are you saying I’m a
punishment
to be around?  I’m training Hancock, dammit.  Successfully, too.”  Keaton sounded like a kid-harassed suburban mother today.  Always with the different voices and obscure settings.

“You said yourself you have
episodes
,” Tonya said.  To her surprise, Keaton didn’t spray invective at her for her comment.  “Is there any way I can help you reduce the number of them?”

“Sure.  Ship over a nice fat surplus woman Transform twice a month,” Keaton said.  “Low juice is the most common trigger.”

“I can’t guarantee the timing of surplus Transforms coming available,” Tonya said, her voice trailing off in a mixture of disgust and shame.

“Well fuck, oh wondrous Council Toady, I can’t guarantee the timing of my hunt successes, either.  Hancock will need to take her chances, the same way you do when you deal with me in person.”  To Tonya’s horror, she overheard a couple of elementary school-aged kids come up to Keaton and ask for raspberry Kool-Aide.

She didn’t have the nerve to ask how real this was.  Or how real the sound of gurgling liquid was.

“You don’t think I’d be able to stop you if you lost it with me?”
Tonya asked.

“Babe, I’ll be honest with you.  My guess is that we would both die.  On the other hand…”

“Yes?”

“Understand, despite the fact that Hancock is the most annoying thing since beach sand in the bikini, the fact I have her around to beat up markedly improves the chances I won’t go psycho on you,” Keaton said.  “Think about what I’ve said long and hard before you push me to let Hancock go.”

Click.

Tonya slammed the phone down in response and went half-limp up against the edge of her desk, staring at the ceiling.  The Keaton situation always weighed on her conscience, but now the situation had passed beyond ‘weight’ into ‘utterly disgusting’.  Her latest letter from the Canadian letter writer friend had said, “If you choose between them, you risk losing both
.”  Tonya was now convinced the letter writer was the Madonna of Montreal, a Canadian Focus nearly as revered as Shirley Patterson.  Tonya couldn’t discount this revered figure’s unexpectedly plain advice.  Despite the ‘personal gain’ she might get from having Hancock be Keaton’s punching bag, Keaton needed to find a way to let Hancock go or help Hancock figure out how to solve her graduation assignment.

I was much better after my first post-Monster-draw kill.  The next morning I fixed Keaton her breakfast favorite, Eggs Benedict, plus enough pancakes, sausages and hash browns to feed three Arms.  I sat quietly at the table and tried to think dour thoughts so I wouldn’t irritate Keaton with my post-kill cheerfulness.  Keaton was on the low side herself and in a sour mood, her own hunt last night obviously unsuccessful.

She tapped an index finger on the kitchen table.  I snapped my attention to her, and waited anxiously for her to reveal what she would throw my way next.  She leaned back in her chair.

“I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned from the Fouke episode and our reactions to her,” Keaton said.  “You need your own hunting territory, so I’m giving you Newark and Baltimore.  You can hunt these two cities whenever you want to, you can collect money, do whatever you want to do.  I won’t hunt them.  If you make the cities so hot with Feds and police that you can’t go back, it’s your problem.

She brought the legs of her chair back down to the ground, and leaned forward towards me. “Philadelphia is mine and New York is mine.  For that matter, the rest of the country is mine, too.  You’ll need other places to hunt besides your territory, as they won’t supply you with enough juice, but you don’t hunt anywhere else without my permission.  Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.  I had questions but she ignored my signal.  She eyeballed me impatiently.

It took me a second to realize what she wanted.  I went down on my knees, gushed my appreciation and groveled for her.  I probably overdid my display, but with Keaton low on juice, a little extra never hurt.

---

“Good.  If you can understand a person, you can control them,” Keaton said, her voice a half octave lower.  I had just given her a cold read on one of the men at the bar.

My eyes narrowed at the wonderful and somewhat unexpected thought.
“Ma’am?”  Lust rose in my loins at her words, primed by hundreds of fruitless hours in the PTA and Library Volunteers.

Keaton had taken me to another seedy bar for more mind reading lessons.  The day after a successful hunt
for her own for juice, of course.  Her best lessons always followed a successful hunt.

Yah, her mind reading trick wasn’t supernatural.  Instead, she based the trick on an understanding of what enhanced Arm senses picked up.  I learned mind reading like a sponge picks up water.  This was the first learned Arm skill in which I possessed natural talent.

“Control.  You didn’t think that the only thing you can do with people is kill them, did you?” she asked.  We sat in a booth in the darkest corner of the room and sipped Bloody Mary’s for effect.

I took a deep and covetous breath.  Controlling humans?  I had instinctively controlled humans in St. Louis.  I wanted more.  Unbidden, a smile covered my face.

Keaton smiled back.

“Most humans are easy to control.  They have all sorts of levers, if you can manipulate them appropriately.
Most will even enjoy being controlled.  Freedom is hard for people.  All those choices, all the responsibility.”

It couldn’t be that easy.

Keaton smiled again.  “Consider what I did to you.”

Oh, fuck.  Yes, it could.

“How much freedom have you had the last six months?” she asked me.

Dangerous question.  “None, ma’am,” I said, my voice low.

“Have I controlled your body?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Have I controlled your thoughts?”

“Yes, ma’am.”  My voice went lower still.

“Have you worked your ass off to do what I want?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re mine, Hancock.  You do what I tell you.  You sweat to make me happy.  You take whatever abuse I dish out.  I can even let you go, and you come back to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  I met her gaze, the whisper gone from my voice.

What she said was true, and it galled that her words were true, but so what?  Someone needed to be the boss, and her name was ‘Keaton’.

Keaton studied me, coldly, and I dropped my eyes in respect.  She quit needling me about how she owned me, though.

“You think I would have more trouble with a normal?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”  Nor would I, when I mastered this.

“You know the basics of how to read people.  Now you learn to control them.  Spend some time with Joe.”  The man I cold read.  “Get him to react.  Study his reactions and learn.  Pay attention to what causes his reactions to change, and how.  By tomorrow morning, I want you to be able to list a few consistent reactions and tell me what causes them.  Don’t lose your temper and kill him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.  I wanted to learn this.  I needed to learn this.  I had been good at this as a
normal
.

I went over to the bar and started talking to the guy.  His name was John Fisher, a married man, but I got him to take his dangerous new woman friend somewhere quiet for the rest of the evening, despite his marriage.