All Beasts Together (The Commander) (3 page)

Gilgamesh smiled.  Unscathed, eh?  Gilgamesh patted his leg, where he now wore Tiamat’s knife.  He
had long suspected his goddess was something special.

“I
prepared something for you, for when you leave,” Shadow said, changing the subject.  “I’ve been working on this ever since you showed up.”

Gilgamesh raised an eyebrow in question.  Shadow took a binder from the drawer of a Queen Anne table laden with ceramic mice and a shadowbox filled with wine corks
, and put the binder on Gilgamesh’s lap.  Gilgamesh opened up the binder.  Inside were all the notes from those long conversations, the letters he and the other Philadelphia Crows had sent to each other, all neatly punched and ordered.  The binder held the cumulative wisdom of Philadelphia, a priceless treasure as well as a dangerous collection of information.  Any Transform researcher in the country would give his soul for the contents of the binder.

“I meant th
ese notes for you, to keep safe,” Gilgamesh said.  He had taken them out of Philadelphia in a grimy box, stained and disorganized.

Shadow nodded.  “Of course.  Don’t forget about the memory problems that come with lean times, though.  I’d hate for you to forget the Philadelphia Massacre and what you and the others accomplished before then.  I made copies of every page.  You don’t need to worry
about losing them.”

Gilgamesh took the binder into his lap and paged through it.  It contained about half of all the notes and letters they had written, all Gilgamesh had been able to recover.

“I’ve added to the notes,” Shadow said. “If you look in the back, I appended a small section containing everything I could think of that would be worth knowing.  The history of Crows that’s safe to know, the names of all the Crows I know, and my observations on Transform Sickness.  Add to these notes as you talk to other Crows and send back to me anything you find out.”

Gilgamesh flipped through to find the section in the back. 
Shadow’s small appendix was half again as large as the original notes.  He closed the binder.  “Thank you.”

“I think I need to clear up a few misconceptions to help you understand what’s going on,” Shadow said, referring most likely to Gilgamesh’s personal additions to the document.  “As you’ve heard, the Focuses did betray the Crows early on.  The first Focuses, not the Focuses who transformed after the end of the Quarantine.  I consider this distinction
very important.  Second, Chevalier does have a claim to the St. Louis Detention Center; he lived in the Center during the Quarantine, though he hasn’t personally used the place since the Quarantine years.  His prickly nature is why the two of us don’t see eye to eye, but Chevalier isn’t a bad man just because he and I don’t get along.  Echo, on the other hand…”

“The warning letters?”

“I get them too.  I don’t know who’s behind them.  I don’t believe Echo is.”

“The intelligence of Arms and Beast Men?”

“I once too believed them to be sub-human, but what you and the other Philadelphia Crows learned changed my mind.”  Pause.  “How many eggs did I flicker into existence behind you?” Shadow asked.  A test.  Just like Thomas the Dreamer, but Shadow dropped the test like a bomb into the middle of a conversation.  Trickier, too: the ‘dross illusion eggs’ had only been ‘visible’ to Gilgamesh’s metasense for three seconds and they had been moving quickly at the time.

“One hundred and seventeen
.”

“You’re improving,” Shadow said.  He grinned widely.  “As you mature further, this and your other talents will improve.”  Gilgamesh nodded.  He needed hope, in any form.

“You need to know I’ve never met a young Crow like yourself,” Shadow said.  Gilgamesh wasn’t sure of the proper response to Shadow’s statement, so he lowered his eyes and watched Shadow’s hands at work.  The Guru grasped a pen in his hands from the end table beside him, but he didn’t write with it.  Instead, he merely twisted it between his fingers, and as he did so, Gilgamesh faintly sensed Shadow’s hands manipulating tiny dross currents.  Gilgamesh waited patiently through the long silence.

“Did you know the Focuses are organizing again?” Shadow asked.

Gilgamesh shook his head.

“T
he younger Focuses are pushing the Council and succeeding, though I’m not happy with the method the troublemakers used to depose the West Region representative last March,” Shadow said.  “Each year there are more Transforms.  We now have two Arms.  Beast Men abound.  Crows gather in flocks for the first time in a half decade, in Boston, Portland and San Francisco.  I fear the same events that overcame the Philadelphia flock may strike at them, as well.”

Gilgamesh shivered.

“When you add everything together, the sum is frightful.  The Transform community is no longer stable,” Shadow said, sounding formal, and twisted his pen again. “The old order, in place since the early days of the Kennedy administration, has no place for Beast Men or Arms.  Things must change, and we Crows find ourselves in the center of the conflict.  How are we to survive something like this?”

Shadow wasn’t a comforting person to listen to.  He
noticed far more troubles than Gilgamesh did and Gilgamesh saw plenty on his own.  He suddenly felt profoundly young and inexperienced, despite his forty some odd years.

“What do I do, sir?”

Shadow shrugged. “I can’t tell you what to do because you’re something new.  The Arm you follow made you into something different.  The older Crows know several advancement pathways. I can teach you them when you get older, but only if you want.  You might come up with something unique, something we need to add to the Crow repertoire.”

Gilgamesh s
at motionless, embarrassed.  At the edge of his metasense, he found he could almost make sense of the complex dross patterns surrounding Shadow.  Shadow’s dross patterns were like the dross art, but intricate, potent, useful in some way the dross art wasn’t useful, and quite specifically hidden.

“What I’ll ask of you is that you follow your heart.  We need you and whatever new talents you
discover.  Keep in contact with me.  What you learn, and share, I can teach.  Because the Transform society is changing, we’re going to need to find new paths to survive.  I think you’ve found a new road to walk.  Keep on it.”

Gilgamesh smiled and began to plan his search for Tiamat.  Shadow
opened the small drawer in the end table and pulled out a business card.  He gave it to Gilgamesh.  Anthony Peloquin, it said, in an elegant cursive script, certainly a false identity, along with the stationery shop’s address.

“And don’t forget to write!” Shadow said, a big smile on his face.

Chapter
2

Air.  Food and water.  Shelter.  Juice.  Transforms might put juice, the substance in them that defines them as Transforms, third on that list.  The
cannier among them, including most Arms, put it second.

“Inventing Our Future”

Carol Hancock: September 23, 1967

After two days of hunting I hit the jackpot in the Quad Cities, a frail forty-ish woman living alone, on the verge of going Monster and of course high on juice.  She laid curled up in her bed in her apartment, surrounded by her collection of ceramic cats and four live Maine Coons.  I staked her out for about two hours, figuring out the particulars.  As far as hunts went, they didn’t come any cleaner than this.

I took her as she slept.  My chosen method of body disposal was simply to crack her bones until
she folded up small and carry the body out in a duffle bag.  With my strength, I would make the bag seem light and no one would suspect a body.  She would vanish into thin air.  People vanished all the time.  With only two Arms in the country, police didn’t think of Arms first when they thought up perps.

I took her juice
and I fell beside her, enjoying the spectacular ecstasy of the kill, even nicer because of the huge load of juice in a woman so close to going Monster, and because I didn’t have to worry about discovery.

She
was a normal kill.  Perfectly normal.  I had no reason to suspect anything unusual might occur.  None at all.

My name is Carol Hancock and I’m an Arm.  You might have already guessed that.

My dark rap sheet includes about 70 kills, 40 of
them men, 30 or so women, and three kids.  I wasn’t happy about the kids.  They never get Transform Sickness.  Like all Arms I’m a predator who preys on Transforms, human survivors of a disease, Transform Sickness.  The Shakes.  I made my transformation about a year ago, in September of 1966.  Armenigar’s Syndrome was the official name of my condition.

Back in the third quarter of 1967
, Transform Sickness was still new and uncommon, like the hippies, the counterculture and the societal effects of the baby boomer generation, and the latter topics rated the front pages of the newsweeklies, not the Shakes.  Still, the number of cases increased every year.  People who paid attention to such things were terrified.  The researchers had no idea why the numbers kept climbing.  The pundits called the Shakes everything from a mad plot by the Russians to the next step in human evolution.  Everybody else watched the Carol Burnett Show.

When people contracted Transform Sickness, some lived, and some died.  Of the approximately 85% who lived through their transformations, the vast majority made normal transformations.  Most of those new Transforms didn
’t recognize the change until too late and they died.  Unfortunately, Transforms can’t live without help from a special woman Transform termed a Focus.

The few
who did recognize their transformation, however, could survive quite nicely if they managed to hook up with a Focus.  If they did, they would live to a long, healthy old age.  Even back in 1967, studies showed that Transforms, if they survived the initial onset of the disease and found a juice jockey, were actually healthier than normal humans.

In addition, in
about one in every hundred transformations, some genetic trigger gets tweaked and the Transform grows a lump on her hippocampus termed a metacampus.  If she survives the initial coma and the transition period afterwards, she becomes a Major Transform.  Common wisdom said the only Major Transforms were women, Focuses and Arms like me.  Common wisdom was wrong, and the male version of the Arm, the Chimera, was plain nasty.

Fortunately for humanity Arms and Chimeras
were rare.  In late 1967, in the entire United States, only eight known Arms had transformed and six of them had died.  Of the two survivors, the oldest was Stacy Keaton.  The other was me.  As an Arm I had acquired a full set of predator’s instincts with my transformation, along with a large helping of some nasty sadistic tendencies, over a hundred pounds of extra muscles, a Major Transform’s metasense, and an extremely small chance of surviving.  I spent my first three months as an Arm as a human lab rat for the researchers, and the next six months trapped in brutal captivity that was part apprenticeship and part slavery.

The day I graduated from my apprenticeship had been a glorious day filled with optimism and hope.  I settled in Chicago and
started to make the city mine.  I hunted.  I earned money the old-fashioned way: I took it.  I worked on building an organization, playing to my recruiting and organizational strengths.  Life was peachy.

Then I went and found this easy kill and my life went back into its usual spin cycle…

When reason finally clawed its way back to the surface of my
juice-addled mind, I noticed the warm edge of an orgasm just completed.  Long and lingering, such a perfect way to wake up and perfectly rare since I had to hunt for a partner after a kill.

Contrariwise,
I was burning juice to stay alive.  My throat had been cut and I wasn’t breathing.  Both of my breasts had been torn off.  My left shoulder had been pulled out of its socket, shredded down to the bone.  Last, something was badly wrong with my abdomen.

These two realizations didn’t quite make simultaneous sense.  After a moment of turgid thought distracted by what appeared to be sexual pleasure
, I realized I lay stripped naked, flat on my back, and I was being raped by well over three hundred pounds of Chimera.  His foot plus of pummeling pistoning steel hard cock punctured through every organ in its path.  As he stroked, the Chimera roared something about killing the Arm who had killed his harem.  Clearly not a sixty-minute man, if you catch my drift.  He was huge, at least seven feet tall, and half again as broad across the shoulders as any normal human.  Lying on top of me he had to hunch his massive shoulders and curl his back to bring his face anywhere near mine.

After a few more
piston thrusts his dark, animal eyes met mine, his brown and white muzzle only inches from my face.  He pulled back his lips in a cruel smile to show the gobbets of red flesh hanging from his pointed teeth.  My red flesh.  His hot fetid breath blew into my face as he roared “Die!  Die!  Die!”…and he thrust again.

Damn
, this hurt!  Even through my high juice, the thrust of his impossible steel cock ripped agony as it tore through my innards. The beast paused while still on top of me and in me, his eyes glazed and he shivered, in the grip of some pleasure not quite an orgasm.