Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (26 page)

Gilgamesh thought back.
“The Detention Center in St. Louis was practically an ocean of sludge dross.”

“That might be the source of the problem.
If she took juice there, she almost certainly picked up some dross as well.”  Wire smiled. “So see, now you have your introduction.  You can just volunteer to clean up all that dross she’s carrying around.  I’m sure she’d be glad of it.  She would probably be willing to do all the cuddling you want.”

“Um, right,” Gilgamesh said.  The other two Crows laughed uproariously.

Gilgamesh sighed and blushed.  He actually did want to talk to Tiamat someday, in person.  From a safe distance.  He was intensely curious about her.  Intensely curious.

Unfortunately, it didn’t look like the other Philadelphia Crows were interested in doing anything with his idea for moving sludge dross.  Gilgamesh took a deep breath, and decided he would need to come up with another way to contribute to the general
well-being of the Philadelphia Crows.

“So,” Sinclair said.  “When are we going to hear your Beast Man story, Gilgamesh?”

“When I can remember the events without panicking,” Gilgamesh said.  “Soon.”

Tonya stood and arched her back
, watching the sun slide down the sky through the upper branches of the trees to her west.  She had to admit it, a day out picking corn and other vegetables had been good for her body and her mind.  This was her household’s second trip to the Jeppesen farm since Delia’s suggestion and Tonya had succumbed to Honey’s blandishments about how wonderful it was to be out of Philadelphia and working in the clean summer air.

She picked up her full bushel of corn and headed back to the truck.  She found Phil, one of her ‘adjustment projects’, dozing behind the truck, shirking his duty again.  She rattled his cage by yanking on his juice, and he instantly found himself awake and at work.

“Danny?” she asked.  Danny Seymore and Pete Vinote had been trading off bodyguard duty today so they could dig potatoes.  Danny stood at attention at the far end of her metasense range, peering into the twilight darkness of the forest that marked the western edge of the farm.  The forest did not impress, only a thin strip of trees, perhaps two hundred feet wide, with a dirt road on the other side.  “What’s the problem?”

“Dunno, ma’am,” he said.  “I thought I felt someone watching me.”

Tonya motioned for Todd Batten, a bodyguard who had been with her for nearly five years, to join her.  “Something up, Mom?” he asked.  She nodded.  ‘Mom’ was the term the old Transforms in her household used for her, the Transforms who had been with her since the early days.

She sniffed when she reached Danny.  Sniffed again.

“Monster,” she said.  She knew that smell, the smell of living bad juice, anywhere.

Todd whistled a warning signal, one from the old days when she and her household had hunted Monsters.  The work crew of fifteen dropped what they were doing and ran, some to the truck to get weapons, others for cover near the truck.  Unlike Focus Rizzari’s household, Tonya’s household women didn’t go through bodyguard training.  Of the work crew of fifteen, only six were men and fit for combat, and one, Marty Fenner, their household financial manager, had received only rudimentary firearms training.

Tonya gave the situation a moment of thought.  She grabbed a large bore hunting rifle and motioned for five of the armed men with her to head toward the forest.  She left Ralph back with the women and took Marty along.  Ten paces from the edge of the forest, she heard another whistled signal.  She stopped and motioned everyone down into a crouch.

The signal had come from inside the strip of forest.

Not typical Monster behavior.

In the twilight she caught motion, something low and Monsterish heading to her left, out of her metasense range and on the far side of the strip of forest that butted up against the dirt road.  Tonya motioned and her people ran as well, paralleling the forest strip.  Forty paces farther, a second something took off, this one human-sized, on this side of the strip of trees and several hundred yards farther along.  Tonya swore this was a human woman.

“Get to her.  My guess is the Monster’s hunting her.”  They sprinted and slowly overtook the woman, her sprint slowed by the underbrush.  Tonya kept her metasense focused in the direction of the Monster on the other side of the strip of forest, wary of a sudden charge.  So far, the Monster remained content to stay out of metasense range.

The play of light and darkness as the sun set behind the strip of forest was distracting and eerie.  She saw the woman and the Monster only by their outline against the sun.  Their shadows.  Flicker – there.  Flicker – gone.  Hypnotic, made worse by the repetitious pattern of the sound of her steps echo
ing in and out as Tonya passed close to the larger trees.  It raised the hair on her neck.

Crops didn’t grow so
close to the trees, and the long-past spring plowing had left a furrowed path that threatened to twist ankles and send Tonya sprawling.  Tonya followed the quick snap of twigs and the woman’s breath, heavy, as she ran.  Flicker flicker.  To the side, farther away and still out of metasense range, she faintly heard the hotter breath of the Monster, a sibilant hiss hiss hiss.  To Tonya’s surprise, the Monster’s movement didn’t involve any sounds of crashing through the underbrush.  Flicker – the Monster no longer ran on all fours.  Now its front paws hung inches above the ground.  Hands, not paws.  With fingers.  Flicker.  A tail as well, short and stubby.

No Monster she had run into ever acted or looked like this.  The Monsters she had run into before, if as exposed as this one, would have charged.

“Tonya!” Danny shouted.  Tonya jerked out of her flicker-induced reverie and slowed to a walk.  She looked to where Danny pointed.  Her metasense followed.  The woman they trailed was a Transform.  A Transform covered in fur and thus a Monster, wearing only a pair of man’s shorts, right now bent over and heaving with exhaustion.

“No!” the fur-covered woman said, gasping for air.  She turned away from them and shouted “Help!”

Her words were nearly unintelligible but still a surprise, as Monsters didn’t talk.  Nor did this woman metasense as a Monster, despite her appearance.  A tiny bit of fear of the unknown crept into Tonya.

Then a second woman stood
, appearing from nowhere, and walked into Tonya’s metasense range.  This one metasensed as both Transform and Monster.  She appeared to be almost fully human, an older woman, perhaps in her late forties or early fifties, with several bands of eye-catching iridescent scales along her face.  She wore blue jeans and a man’s shirt, and carried a rifle.  Tonya’s breath caught at the incongruity of the second woman’s appearance.

“You leave Becky alone, Focus,” the woman said.  “We’re not here to harm you.”

Tonya found herself suddenly drenched in sweat.  This Monster woman spoke a complete sentence!  None of this made any sense.  Worse, she noticed the real Monster, some sort of lizard, now heading toward them.

She motioned her men down, prone.  “There’s a Monster behind you,” she said, quietly, to the women.  “Come over here and we’ll protect you.”

The woman with the rifle laughed.

“We did not want to disssturb you, Focussss,” the Monster said, and stepped into Tonya’s metasense range.  “Thissss wasss our camp.”

Chimera.

It couldn’t be anything else.  She had metasensed Crows before and this thing had the same icky sticky diffuse juice structure
as a Crow.  Only this creature’s presence shown brighter and more concentrated than any Crow she had ever metasensed, not that two metasensed Crows made much of a sample.

Lori
believed Chimeras to be potentially more dangerous than Arms.  Tonya knew she didn’t have the muscle with her to win a fight against an Arm, not out here in the open.  Perhaps there was another way.

“I apologize for disturbing you and your band of Transforms,” Tonya said, and amped up her charisma.  “Perhaps it would be best for all of us if you and your Transforms left this area and returned to where you came from.”

Tonya hated Monsters and distrusted the idea of Monsters working together.  One Monster at a time was bad enough.  Yet these not-quite-Monster women radiated far less danger than a normal Monster would.  More controlled.  More human.  On the other hand, the lizard Chimera felt more dangerous than anything Tonya had ever faced, not counting Keaton.  However, he was a Major Transform, and almost by definition, Major Transforms were dangerous.

“Hssssss,” the lizard Chimera said.  “Come, Cleo, Becky.”

The woman with the rifle nodded and motioned for the fur-covered woman to go first.  A half minute later, the woman with the rifle slowly backed off, gun at the ready, watching their every twitch.  Within five minutes, they were gone, west, over the dirt road.

All
seven
of them.  Tonya had missed four of them until they started their retreat.

Tonya realized they had a problem.  She had an idea about
how to solve it, but her idea would take some prep work.  She would start as soon as she returned home.

---

“…and, yes, the Chimera was able to speak.  It’s as you feared,” Tonya said.

“Then I must take steps,” Focus Shirley Patterson said.  “You must as well.  Organize your people and get your big guns out of storage.  I’ll increase my patrol frequency and up the number of Beast juice-traps around Hilltop.  You’ve done well, Tonya, and God shines down upon you with His grace.  Goodbye.”

Tonya hung up the phone and took a deep breath.  She shook her head for a moment, trying to clear the cobwebs out of it.  Her needlepoint lay in her lap, untended.  Wasn’t she supposed to be doing something?

Right.  Phone calls.

She could have sworn she had been talking to someone on the phone just now, but she wasn’t sure and couldn’t for the life of her remember who it might have been.

Stress.  The Chimera encounter had caused her too much stress.  The thought she might have been talking to someone on the phone seeped out of her head.

Perhaps she wasn’t taking the Chimera encounter seriously enough.  Tonya thought through her options, and decided she needed to organize the Philadelphia Focuses and get them out patrolling.  It was time to get the big Monster-hunting guns out of storage…and, if possible, talk to Keaton.

My dream turned from a normal Keaton torture dream, nothing special, to the utter terror of a repeated nightmare.  Dead babies bled across the sky above a pinball machine the size of a building, where inside giant steel balls chased me.  Something fought the pinball machine, an angelic presence I perceived as a Madonna figure, only she held a severed arm in her own arms, instead of the Christ child.  She wove a different dream, equally terrifying, of immense crowds listening as I spoke, a dream that tried to chase away the pinball machine dream.

“Kate!  You’re screaming!”  I awoke to Bobby’s gentle shaking, and had him straddled, his throat in my hand, before I knew myself.  I quieted my shaking heart with slow success and forced myself to remember my name and location.

I was in Bobby’s apartment in Baltimore.  Me?  Right.  An Arm.  Carol Hancock.  Yes, the dream symbolism bothered me, scary nonsense.  I
had taken juice two days ago, failing for the second time even to let go of my kill.  Hell, I had regressed back to baby Arm crap the instant I started to work on mastering my graduation test.  All psychological, I knew.  I would be working on improving my control with every draw until I succeeded.

“Kate?”

“Sorry, Bobby.  Nightmare.  Remembering an old fight,” I lied.  What else could I say?

---

That evening, when I finished serving Keaton dinner, I stood respectfully as she got up from the table.  I started to clean up the mess, expecting her to head out to the gym.  Normally, she did her workout while I cleaned up, and I did mine after she finished.  After my workout, I would work on my latest project, mastering a set of tricks Keaton taught me involving safecracking.  In particular, I had a four-foot cubical safe I acquired that I had better learn how to crack soon.

Tonight Keaton skipped her workout, went over to her recliner and sat.

Bad, bad sign.  When Keaton started brooding, I got nervous.  I left her alone in our joined kitchen – dining – relaxation area.  I would clean up later.  I didn’t want to be in the same room with her when she suffered through one of her darker moods.  Low juice.  It had to be low juice again.

At least she didn’t have race riots in her territory.  Damn, the riots in Newark pissed me off.  How dare anyone stage race riots in my city!  At least Baltimore, the other territory Keaton gave to me, didn’t have any riots.  So far.

I went back into my storeroom and following one of Zielinski’s suggestions, I meditated.  No clank of weights, no workout by Keaton.  After I finished meditating, I pondered what to do.  I decided I might be able to creep over to the weight area without bothering Keaton, and I did so.

I started my exercises
slowly, but after a while, I got into the mood.  The effort and focus of intense exercise burns away all sorts of problems.