All Beasts Together (The Commander) (17 page)

The Chimera sank back down on all fours and slowly lumbered off
, following the creek downstream.  He wasn’t going to fight.  Damn, a fight would have almost been fun.  I stayed behind him, close enough to shoot but not to touch.

Normals didn’t see
him.

That scared me.  Normals certainly saw me.

“I claim all Chicago.”  I didn’t put as much Arm into that statement as I should have.  Perhaps I should repeat it?  Nah.

“I claim wherever I stand and I go wherever my feet tell me to wander,” the Chimera said
, turning his massive head to look back at me through the brush.  “You may call me Odin.  I am a Hunter.”

The farther I trailed him the less angry I got.  The more worried I became.  Odin’s comment ‘his word is the Law’ bothered me.  It reminded me of a certain Officer Canon who
had tried to recruit me in Philadelphia.  Fought with me, as well, the evil SOB.  His Master?

“I am the Arm known of as Hancock,” I said.  “Has your Master ever spoken of me?”

“Why yes, Arm known of as Hancock,” Odin said.  “My Master says you’re as foolishly stubborn as all the other Arms.  Now, I have evidence my Master is correct.  If you continue following me once we reach the edge of town, I will fight.”

I followed from farther back from then on
, disquieted by Odin’s ‘all the other Arms’ comment.  My ignorance bothered me a lot.

The closer he got to the edge of my claimed turf, the less interested I
became in fighting him for the sake of fighting.  When the city turned to corn and wheat fields, I stopped.  Odin plowed on, oblivious to me and the rest of the world.

This was goddamned aggravating.  When the world turned aggravating, I went hunting.

Gilgamesh: November 19, 1967

Gilgamesh
metasensed Tiamat kill the forklift driver and shuddered.  After a year, the fierce abandon with which she killed still unnerved him.  Yet, that’s what he had been searching for the last two months: her fierce abandon.

The wind whipped fresh snow by him but he didn’t shiver, old enough as a Crow to be oblivious to the cold.  Gilgamesh had found Tiamat, but no Crows, as Sky predicted.  Unfortunately, with the Crows gone, the riff-raff had moved in.  Beast Men.  Bad for the neighborhood, drove down property values, the works.  He found enough Beast Men traces to give him nightmares.  He wanted to weep.  Chicago
remained a horror and didn’t show any sign of getting better.

Last week, after Gilgamesh arrived in town to huddle near Tiamat
’s home, he had spotted two Beast Men nosing around at night to the south of Tiamat’s place, near Cicero, deep in the Chicago urban area and at the edge of his metasense range.  They didn’t stay or come close.  Gilgamesh found it strange to metasense Beast Men avoiding a fight.

He found Carol’s confrontation with the Beast Man yesterday even stranger.  While hiding under Tiamat’s glow he
had drawn close enough to hear the Beast Man’s chat with Tiamat.  He called himself a Hunter, named himself Odin, and claimed a Master named Wandering Shade.  His master’s name sounded vaguely familiar, but Gilgamesh couldn’t place it from his studies.  He wondered if Odin’s master was the same as Enkidu’s, since Enkidu also referred to himself as a Hunter.  Enkidu had never named his Master.

After Odin left the area, Tiamat
hunted.  Now, after nearly a day of relatively good fun trailing the oblivious Arm, Gilgamesh curled under a railroad bridge, three miles away from Tiamat, keeping company with old trash, broken glass, and the grimy remnants of several heroin parties.

Gilgamesh was forty
-four years old and appeared twenty-two, with thick black hair and a lean, muscular build.  He was clean and well-dressed except for the filthy trench-coat, which made him look like he belonged under the bridge. The trench coat didn’t keep out the cold, but Gilgamesh didn’t care.

Tiamat
remained as beautiful as he remembered.  Gilgamesh closed his eyes and concentrated on Tiamat with his metasense, looking to any passer-by like a drunken derelict.  From three miles away, he metasensed Tiamat and her prey clearly.  This time she hunted a male Transform forklift driver without a Focus tag.  Gilgamesh doubted the man even realized he had Transform Sickness.

Tiamat took her prey to the alley behind the Twilight Massage Parlor and Lingerie Modeling Studio
and stripped him down to his skin.  Her movements showed a concentrated roughness Gilgamesh recognized as barely controlled hunger.  Then she laid her skin against her prey and pulled the juice out of him with vicious brutality in but three seconds, spewing dross like blood all over the area, filling her up to overflowing with raging energy.  Tiamat was both more powerful and less controlled than she had been in Philadelphia.

Tiamat dropped on top of her prey, lost in the grip of post-kill ecstasy as the rush of juice flowing into her overwhelmed her mind and senses with pleasure.  She was vulnerable passed out like this; the Skinner, the mature Arm,
had almost died in Philadelphia in such a trance.  Gilgamesh sighed.  Tiamat ignored her vulnerability.  He waited.  In a half an hour or so, Tiamat would recover sufficiently to deal with the evidence of her kill.  All but the dross that flowed from her prey when he died, dross Tiamat couldn’t sense.

Gilgamesh lived on the dross,
the same way Tiamat lived on the juice, except in much smaller quantities.  He couldn’t take in dross this raw, but in a couple of days the dross would age, and he would come back and drink it down, in small sips over several hours.

This dross
would be good, too, his first real Arm dross since Philadelphia.  He had other sources of dross, but none as refined and uncontaminated as Tiamat’s kills.  Juice draw dross was clean and sweet, not as spicy as the dross she produced during her normal juice use.  When he managed to track down Tiamat’s graveyard, where she put her bodies, he would strike it rich.  He would have dross enough to feed ten Crows.

An old feeling, shame, returned from where it had lain dormant since he fled Philadelphia.  Tiamat was a murderous predator and
he couldn’t avoid this truth as he metasensed her take the man.  True, the man would have gone into hideous juice withdrawal if Tiamat hadn’t killed him first.  True, no one deserved that sort of death.  Worse, some men in withdrawal went psychotic, turning into spree killers.  If the man had been one of those, Tiamat probably saved lives.

Rationalizations.  Tiamat was a killer, a predator, unfettered by morality or law.  Innocence, a Crow he
had met once long months ago in Cincinnati, had told him all Major Transforms were predators.  Gilgamesh tried not to think about how correct the senior Crow had likely been.

Gilgamesh took a breath and tried to let go of his bleak thoughts.  He succumbed to them every time he
metasensed Tiamat kill and they hit him harder now since this was the first he had seen in Chicago.  His guilt was nothing more than a futile exercise.  He had chosen his path a long time ago and he wasn’t going to change now.

Carol Hancock: November 19, 1967 – November 20, 1967

For something as glorious as the kill, cleaning up was a bitch.

I came to on top of my kill filled to overflowing with juice, tight as a wound spring with energy, and stoned out of my mind.  The wound spring was tightest between my legs and made me horny as hell.  Flashes of pleasure still tingled along my nerves.  My conscious mind floated just barely above the surface of a raging sea of passions and lusts.  Every touch or motion stroked sensations along my nerves that threatened to swamp my mind completely, an annoying distraction on a bright November afternoon, behind the Twilight with a very incriminating body on my hands.

The glory
was like this each time, perhaps a little better every time.

First things first, though.  I dumped forklift boy’s body into the trunk of his car and checked the area for signs.  None.  I drove to the nearest No Tell Motel, where I called Luke and
ordered him to come by.

Luke came into the room with a tense hesitation, eager and nervous both.  He had cause.  I could be a little frightening right after a kill, all passion and energy, with reason only barely in control.  Even at my best I was more intense than a normal man was equipped to handle.  I didn’t care, though, and let the wild rumpus begin.

Three hours or so later, I left Luke on the bed, groggy and smiling a stupid little grin, so exhausted he couldn’t even move.

Me, I was energized, not satisfied, but sated enough I could think about other things.
In specific, body disposal issues.  Luke had brought my kit with him, as per my orders.  I took the body out to an isolated piece of property south of town I owned under a pseudonym.  I bled out the body and cut it up, bundled it up small in a burlap sack and buried it deep.  My coverall was well bloodied, but my body was clean, so I stowed the coverall with the tarp for later washing, and dumped the blood into the sewer over by the stockyards.

The rest was harder. 
I spent most of the rest of the night sneaking into forklift boy’s apartment and carefully planting all the signs of a voluntary, if hasty, departure.  I packed a suitcase for him, and left some money with a note for the landlord, in his handwriting, saying he had gotten a call from an old girlfriend and needed to go out to California.  It took time to find out exactly how much he paid in rent, and the little details of history and character that made the charade seem real.  I didn’t finish until almost dawn.

I felt better for the hunt, the kill, the juice and the sex.  Yet another confrontation with a Chimera, another talker,
made me edgy.  I defended my turf, yes, but at what price?  This whole thing bothered me as much as it had bothered Keaton back in Philadelphia.  Someone named Wandering Shade, who I half suspected had also been Officer Canon, poked at me, probing my defenses.  More would come.  I just smelled it.

Finally, I dumped the now murderously used car at Moose’s place and gave it to him at a discount to ensure
this part of the world would never see the car again.  I grabbed a quick breakfast at Lucie’s Coffee Shoppe then spent another hour in the garage of my house cleaning out my kit.

Bobby, my man, still sle
pt.

“Jesus, Bobby, this place is a pit!” I said
as I came through the back door from the garage.  My bellow sent Bobby’s naked ass out of bed like a rocket, to stand at attention in more ways than one.  I had told him to clean the mess up before I left.  He hadn’t made more than a half-assed attempt.  Fuck.  “What do you expect, lover boy, for an Arm to go and clean up after you!  Get a move on.  Now!”  Anger overflowed, the Arm anger that looked at disobedience as a challenge to my dominance.

Bobby
picked up a couple of newspapers from a pile in the dining room, but instead of putting them away went down on his knees on the un-vacuumed carpet in front of me.  “Carol.  I’m yours.”

Oh, hell.  His words melted my heart, as they always did.

“Bobby, you’re mine,” I said.  Dammit, he wasn’t an Arm and didn’t need me treating him as if he was.

“I’m yours,” he
said, a conscious repetition.  He put my hand on his head.

“You’re mine.”  As I
had done the last few times he used this ‘calm down the Arm’ ritual of his, I extended my metasense.  Yes, as with the last two times, I caught the tiniest flicker of juice movement.  Three times made it real.  Something going on here was a juice effect.

Far out, as the young kids would say.  Far freaking out.  Embarrassing, too.  No way
would I mention something this screwy and embarrassing to anyone, at least yet.  A juice effect involving a normal, triggered by a normal?  No one would believe this.  Zielinski might, though.  I promised myself to talk to him about it if the dangers surrounding us ever receded and I could talk to him in person again, but nobody else.  I would have to pledge him to secrecy as well.

Whatever
the juice effect was, it worked.  Instead of cleaning he soon ended up in my bed.

---

“This had better be an actual emergency, Hancock, or I’m going to be sorely tempted to make a visit to Chicago,” Keaton said.  I couldn’t call her directly, but after I reported my fight with Enkidu, she had relented and given me the phone number of the woman who ran her answering service.  Emergencies only, she said.  Our relationship was in
her
hands, if you catch my drift.  Me?  I was just glad Keaton was somewhere else.  I had no idea where else, but I didn’t care, so long as she stayed the hell out of Chicago.

I
took the call from the bedroom, a barren room containing little more than a king-sized mattress laid on the floor and the phone.  I didn’t lie on the bed as I talked, not fool enough to relax while dealing with Keaton.  Instead, I paced as I told her about my run-in with Odin, not leaving out a single detail.  With the Chimeras I needed all the help I could get, or at least all the help that didn’t open me up to enslavement by Keaton again.

“Motherfucking shit dammit cuntlicking fiends!” Keaton said.  Yes! 
She aimed her anger at the Chimeras, not me.  “Another Hunter.  There’s something you need to know, Hancock: my espionage mission in Kansas City succeeded.  Only the Chimeras in that nest called themselves Patriarchs.  These cocksuckers are spreading like motherfucking cockroaches!”  Was Keaton a little more foul mouthed than usual today?  I couldn’t decide.