Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (44 page)

The tableau in front of him filled him with dismay.

Grendel had lost it and gone Beast, his feet running underneath him in panic, unable to gain traction.  The dumbbell to the head had clearly addled the older Hunter, and he gushed blood from the Arm’s latest slice.  Enkidu reached down, grabbed a slowly rolling dumbbell, and charged over to protect Grendel.  As Grendel regained traction, Enkidu tossed the dumbbell above Grendel, where the Arm would have to leap in order to finish him.

The Arm didn’t leap; instead, the Arm threw a knife at Grendel’s head, barely missing because of Grendel’s alligator snapping.  She backed
away from Enkidu, impossibly quick, blood dripping from her own wounds, continuing to leak stinky juice.  Perhaps she would run out of juice and fall at Enkidu’s feet.  She looked nearly as beat up as Grendel.

The Arm didn’t fall at Enkidu’s feet, though, and with yet another impossible burst of speed she turned, ran up a wall and kicked out, over Enkidu and back toward Grendel.  Enkidu charged and leapt to protect Grendel, adjusting his leap at the last instant to avoid Grendel’s flailing claws and snapping jaws.

The Arm landed on Grendel’s back, prone.  She held on tight, ready for Grendel to flip over and try to crush her.  Enkidu skidded to a stop, now three quarters of the way across the room, and turned to charge back into combat.

It gave him a ringside seat to Grendel’s end.  The fool Hunter gave up, bowing his head in defeat.  Idiot!  This wasn’t a challenge fight, this was war!  The Arm’s knife slashed deep into Grendel’s throat and neck, nearly decapitating him as Enkidu wolf-howled terror and charged.

Now the fight was up to him.

“Stop this now!” Tonya said as she struggled to her feet.  She aimed her command at the protesters who continued to throw things.  A thrown book fluttered toward her, and she caught it on the fly.  A Holy Bible.

A smile passed quickly over Tonya’s face as she watched the last of the psychos fall after a head shot by Danny.  The psycho in question had been about to take a bite out of Tommy Landis’s arm.

Tonya dodged a bottle.  “This is my bible as well!” Tonya shouted to the crowd of protesters.  “I regularly go to confession.  There’s even a chapel in my household.  I say the rosary daily.  We are not your enemies!”

Of the half dozen or so in the front rank of protesters, two heard Tonya’s words and bowed their heads sheepishly.  Their comrades and the next rank of protesters pushed forward, unaffected by Tonya or her charisma.

“The ones we killed were Transform men in withdrawal,” Tonya said
, pumping charisma into her words.  “We acted in self-defense.  There was no way to save them.”

A bottle flew over her head and smashed to the street.  Behind her, an impatient soul blared his horn for five seconds.  The unaffected members of the crowd continued forward.

Tonya’s charisma lacked the strength.  Too many protesters, too far away.  Her words didn’t have enough of an effect.  Logic wouldn’t be enough and Tonya knew full well how artificial and false her spiel sounded, even when backed by her charisma.

The protesters wouldn’t be out here protesting unless they already believed that all Transforms were Monsters.  They refused to believe the late stage withdrawal victims were Transforms.  The Holy Bible in her hands was worthless.

If Tonya didn’t do something fast her guards would have to start shooting.  She couldn’t allow that to happen.  They carried Monster guns.  They couldn’t ‘shoot to wound’; at short range, her guards’ weapons would blow these protesters apart, the same way they blew the psychos apart.  Tonya felt queasy just at the thought of firing.  The protesters were
people
, and they didn’t deserve to die just because they were stupid.

“To me,” Tonya said to her people, and strode forward.  Toward the protesters.  She batted away a thrown perfume bottle and didn’t break stride.  Visions of blood and slaughter filled her mind.

Her guards went with her.

A wolf’s howl echoed from the warehouse district to the north, freezing everyone but her.  “Come on!” she urged her people.  They didn’t move.  A juice effect!

The juice trick didn’t last long.  Both her people and the protesters surged forward.  Tonya moved as well, not as confident as before the howl.  Butterflies filled her stomach.  More went on here than her confrontation.

Gilgamesh couldn’t turn his metasense away from the fight, much as he wanted to.  Shock filled him.  He knew the predators were dangerous, all three of them, but the brutal viciousness of the fight overwhelmed him.  All of them possessed strength and speed he would never obtain.

Still, Gilgamesh grinned a snarl of his own at Grendel’s fall.  The murderous bastard who killed Wire was dead, even though it appeared he gave himself up to the Skinner in the instant before she killed him.  That wasn’t enough to redeem him, Gilgamesh decided.

The Skinner paid a price for eliminating Grendel, because it gave Enkidu a chance to catch up with her.
Enkidu fanged open her right leg at the thigh before she leapt away, and ripped a gaping wound from her hip to her knee.

She should have fallen.  She had lost the use of both her right arm and right leg, and she had multiple other wounds, the worst being the gouge in her side.  She shouldn’t have been able to walk at all.  She still stood, and she still moved, hobbling now, with none of her lightning speed.

The Skinner and Enkidu faced each other across Grendel’s fallen body, fifteen feet apart.  Enkidu remained uninjured.

Gilgamesh still wasn’t sure who would win, despite the Skinner’s wounds.  Enkidu had underestimated the Skinner.  He still did, if Gilgamesh read the Beast’s posture.  Enkidu’s tension dissipated, replaced by a lip-licking smirk.  Larger, stronger and unwounded, Enkidu thought he had already won.

The Skinner did something that astonished Gilgamesh.  She leaned backwards, with a sort of mocking ease and stood there, just tossing her knife into the air and catching it again.  Mocking.  Arrogant.  Contemptuous.

Enkidu lost it.  He roared and charged.  The Skinner’s hand blurred with motion as she pulled another knife from behind her back and threw it.  The knife landed in the center of Enkidu’s chest.  The Arm didn’t meet his charge; instead, she caught her first knife on its descent and
hopped.

Gilgamesh
had thought she would be crippled and nearly immobile with her injured leg.  Instead, with only one leg, she still maneuvered faster and with more agility than any normal human.

She put her knife back into its sheath as she flew through the air and used her one functional hand to grab a rope.  As Enkidu leapt into the air after her, she swung and let go, passing inches behind his back.  She unsheathed her knife again, cut him deep and low in his back as she flew by, then grabbed his foot and held.
Her weight altered his trajectory and he missed the rope.  He kicked and she let go, flying through the air to land heavily on the ground.  Enkidu, larger, landed much more heavily, and quite awkwardly, driving the first thrown knife deep into his massive chest.  The Skinner hopped in and cut him again, slicing deep into his lower left leg before he recovered, leaving him as injured as the Skinner, if not worse.

The Skinner was no more injured than she had been before.  In a flash of insight, Gilgamesh saw Enkidu’s big mistake.

His Beast Men captors figured that since they were larger and stronger than any Arm, their size and strength would be enough to compensate for an Arm’s more efficient muscles. The two of them, against an unconscious Arm, should have been able to win.

However, Enkidu had been a
Major Transform for only six months.  The Skinner had been a Major Transform for four
years
.  Bigger and stronger meant little.  The Skinner’s four years of juice-powered development, as well as her four years of devious tricks and experience with her Arm capabilities, was an immense advantage.

The two Beast Men would have taken Tiamat, an Arm with similar experience as a Transform.  The Skinner was something else, and Enkidu was playing out of his league trying to take her by himself.

The Skinner attacked Enkidu again, darting in and out, staying out of his reach, cutting him thrice more and emptying some firearm at him.  To Gilgamesh’s surprise, the firearm slowed Enkidu less than the Skinner’s knives had.

After Grendel’s fall, Enkidu hadn’t
touched
the Skinner.

Enkidu then proved he wasn’t stupid.  After the hail of bullets, as the Skinner changed clips, Enkidu ran.

Never forget that Arms are dangerous.  If an Arm wants you to submit, submit.  If the Arm wants you to dance, dance.  If the Arm wants to screw you silly, allow her.  If the Arm wants to kill you – well, I hope you have made peace with your God.

“The Book of Arms”

“Stop the fighting.  Go home.  We’re all safe now.  We killed them in self
-defense,” Tonya said, leaning on her charisma.  She kept her charismatic command simple and stupid, ignoring logic.  A few more of the protesters fled.  Her guards held their fire.  She approached close enough to the first rank of protesters to smell their last meals.

She repeated the message.  More charisma.  The protesters were too close to throw rocks and bottles, and Tonya’s charisma prevented any protesters close enough to take a swing from doing so.  Perhaps one in ten of them naturally resisted her charisma, but they were a mob now.  The ones who resisted followed those who dispersed.  A second wolf howl sounded to the north, stopping the protesters
for a moment, before goading the fleeing protesters into a panicked run.

The howl didn’t stop her.

She repeated her message again as sirens began to echo in the distance.  A few of the protesters who resisted now got close enough to take a swing.  She stuck her index finger in the face of one who approached too close and Tommy pushed him away.  Caught up in the mob mind, he fled.  The protesters screamed and yelled at her, but they didn’t drown out her voice or her charisma.  Again, Tonya made eye contact and gave the orders.  Again.

Tonya’s body hurt, hurt badly.  Not from the attacks but because she had exhausted her juice.  All Focuses had low juice, for reasons Tonya did not understand.  There wasn’t anything to be done about it, and she didn’t possess the necessary talents to use the juice held in her household juice buffer.

She did everything the hard way.  As always.

“Stop the fighting.  Go home.  We’re all safe now,” Tonya said.  As the lead protesters dispersed, others stepped forward to confront Tonya and her household.  Her body ached with fatigue and low juice.

Her mind spun back to a memory from a year and a half ago at a Northeast Region Meeting, a confrontation with Lori.  ‘What have you turned me into by forcing me to hunt Monsters with my people?’ Lori had said, the first time Lori had ever been able to stop her charisma cold.  ‘I’ve become as much a Monster as those I hunt.’  Tonya empathized with Lori’s plight, then and now.

Tonya repeated the message to the protesters and enforced it with her charisma.  Met eyes, made the connection.  If not for Tonya’s own Monster hunting days, her will wouldn’t be strong enough to
disperse a crowd
.  No Focus had ever done anything like this before.  “Stop the fighting!  Go home!”  People fled her.  No human should be able to do this.

How inhuman had she become?

How much of a Monster was she?

“Stop, stop,” Pete said.  “They’re all gone.”  He held Tonya upright, her legs wobbly underneath her.

Tonya existed now in some sort of half-trance of extreme juice use, brought on by the use of her charisma while her personal juice count approached withdrawal.

She had done it.

She had stopped a slaughter.

She was so low on juice that she could barely see.  She couldn’t metasense.  Her body shook with effort and pain.  She scanned around and found nothing to do.  No enemies.  The psychos were dead, the threatening protesters scattered, and there had been no third wolf howl.

Tonya’s legs failed her completely and she fell into a half-unconscious swoon.

Officer Cannon led me to the back seat of his police car.  Something was wrong with this back seat.  The smell was off and I didn’t feel like I sat on a car seat.  I probed Officer Canon again with my metasense, but this time I didn’t break free of her control.  I pressed harder and snarled.  In the distance, I swore I heard a wolf howl.

“Don’t bother with the wild wolf routine, Hancock,” Officer Canon said, echoing my thoughts.  She spoke with an angry growl, deep and loud, a man’s voice, but the change didn’t matter much to me, since Keaton regularly used the same trick.  I still couldn’t pick up a single thing off of my metasense.  It chilled me that she knew my name.  “We’re all predators, all of us Major Transforms.  Most haven’t realized it, yet.”

Idiot.  Liar.  “Go fuck yourself.  I’m not working for you, no matter what you’re offering.”