All Beasts Together (The Commander) (30 page)

Sky nodded and didn’t answer further.  The allure was building again, he realized.  The Inferno Transforms had learned heightened empathy.  Although each
of them showed their empathy differently, everyone on this mission had the same reaction as Ann.  The Transform community
needed this
!  This was the first Transform household he had ever run into who actually cared about Transforms outside of the household with something beyond raw calculations and oddsmaking, even if the Inferno Transforms were still fumbling their way toward being useful on the larger stage of Transform society.

Inferno, in its appalling rough manner, had grasped the first rung on the ladder of Transform civilization.

Lori had built Inferno, and Inferno was beautiful, and he was hooked.

Carol Hancock: January 4, 1968 – January 11, 1968

I pulled the car into the garage at around 11:00 in the evening.  I
had unsuccessfully hunted Indianapolis the previous several days and I needed a rest before I continued my hunt in Chicago.  The only thing I had found of interest was yet another Chimera sign, just north of Lafayette.  The country was definitely going down the toilet when an Arm could casually find so many Chimera signs.  Worse, I had also picked up Enkidu’s scent in Lafayette, and I kept having the ugly sensation of enemies watching me.

I slammed the door of the Buick with some extra low juice annoyance and glided past the stacks of old newspapers.  Bobby had been supposed to take them out with the trash, but again he
had ‘forgotten’.  I hesitated a moment, wondering if I should take them out myself or lean on Bobby to do so.

“Fuck it,” I said, deciding to echo Bobby and ignore the problem.

I headed out of the garage and pulled the garage door closed behind me.  A cold rain drizzled halfheartedly from the sky and plastered my hair down to my face.  A couple of adventurous drops slipped inside my coat and down my back, and my shoes and the hems of my trousers absorbed water like starving sponges.  I climbed the concrete bricks that served as back steps to my old house and stepped into the utility room, where I hung my dark brown heavy wool Mr. Beacon coat on the coat rack.

Dressed as a man today, I wore a gray business suit over a thick wrap around my waist to thicken it and a band around my breasts to flatten them. 
They had grown back a couple of weeks after Enkidu cut them off.  It looked like I wouldn’t be the titless wonder after all.

I didn’t always dress as a man, but
my heavy muscles actually made passing as a man easier than passing as a woman.  I could do many things easier as a man.  I found it irritating, a bit, because I preferred being a woman, but practicality took precedence.

The utility room trash stank.  Again.  Angry, I strode into the kitchen, stepping over the slippery spot on the floor with a grimace of distaste
, where Bobby had spilled bacon grease several days ago.  Dirty dishes piled in the sink, and a plastic bread bag and a couple of candy bar wrappers lay mixed in with the old newspapers on the kitchen table.  Crumbs piled under the toaster and a brown banana rotted on the counter top.  The top of the stove was thick with old grease, the floor layered with grime and old food.

I ignored it all and made my way to the living room.  The kitchen always looked like that.  Bobby was supposed to keep it clean.
Mostly he didn’t bother.  Weights had migrated from the bedroom into the living room, again.  I didn’t have as complete a setup as I wanted, but I owned a full set of dumbbells, up to 125 pounds, a couple of bars, several hundred pounds worth of plates of varying sizes, and several different benches.  Bobby used them as well and they worked better for him than for me.  The living room held a couch, a couple of chairs and a coffee table these days, evidence of my attempts to remember my humanity.  I had also hung a couple of sets of cheap cream-colored drapes over the windows and kept them always shut, to give privacy.

A
ll those weights in the living room ruined the homey feel I had tried to create and gave my home a kind of cold hostility, a disregarded low rent feel.  The room was dusty, with weights scattered all over, mixed with the remains of old copies of Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune.  A paper plate with a half-eaten sandwich hid over in the corner and a coffee cup with the dregs of old coffee still in the bottom sat nearby.  Bobby’s leftovers.  I would never have left food uneaten and I didn’t drink coffee.  My empty plates lay stacked on the coffee table among the dumbbells, still waiting where I left them.

The small dining room was a disaster with receipts, accounting books, an electronic calculator
trailing fifteen feet of paper, and business paraphernalia piled in sedimentary layers.  More coffee mugs decorated the table, but at least I saw some signs of activity.  You practically had to be an Arm to walk across that room and not make the mess worse.

Let’s face it.  My house was a dump. 
Several weeks ago, Bobby had gotten sick, and I had redecorated in a passion of good intentions and terror of losing Bobby.  Now, with Bobby healthy again, the charming normalcy of a few weeks ago had faded into the cold utility of Arm life, mixed with the detritus of insufficient housekeeping.  Damn it, I didn’t have
time
for housecleaning.  That’s what Bobby was for.

Bobby was getting to be a problem.  He didn’t fit into my life the way he should.  Taking care of the house was his responsibility. 
Did he do anything about it?  No.

I found him in the bedroom, asleep.  I shook him awake, which took work.  “What the fuck is going on here!  Sleeping?  This house is a mess and it’s your responsibility to keep it clean.”

“Carol, what?  I…”

“Don’t give me that shit.  I haven’t given you permission to use my name yet.”  He hadn’t moved, so I grabbed him and yanked him out of bed.  “You’ve got a serious attitude problem and it’s time I did…”

He panicked, clawed at my hands, and when that didn’t work he jabbed me with an elbow.  His attack did nothing but enrage me, and I tightened my grip in such a way as to pinch a nerve cluster in his lower arm.  He screamed in pain and took a swing at me.  When I blocked with my forearm he took another.

I went immediately from angry to full-blown Arm mad.  Nobody challenged me like this, not in my house, not ever.  Two pops from my fists knocked him to the floor; I knelt on his abdomen and started in with the two finger pokes to the pain-causing nerve clusters.

“I’m yours…I’m yours…I’m yours…” he choked out through the pain, but I didn’t answer.  He didn’t feel like mine right now, but a challenger, a rival, someone who needed to learn his place or die.  I didn’t stop until he wet and shat his pants and groveled and begged me to stop enough to register as not even the slightest threat.  I left him there shivering and reeking, alone and in agony, curled up on the floor in his own mess while I stalked outside to cool off.

I stalked the neighborhood for two hours before I regained my composure.  I distracted myself by reviewing my recruiting and organization work.  Using four disposable identities I had partly taken over the Skokie police department; unless they realized the four identities were one they would never figure out what I was doing and the games I played.  I planned to use them to worm my way into the rest of the Chicagoland police information network.  I didn’t recruit these ‘close’, or give them the Carol Hancock Arm treatment; I just suborned them and an investigator would have no way to trace them back to me.  I had also turned two of our local mob boss’s men; they thought a rival mob boss from South Chicago owned them now, not me.  Again, I had recruited these only to gain information, as per Keaton’s hints on the subject.  I also found a small abandoned pet food processing plant in Cicero and turned a hidden and reinforced part of it into an Arm playground, a place for me to work out my anger and rid the world of any bad guys needing removal from life, and deposit their remains in small cement-sealed buckets in Lake Michigan.

Slowly as I walked, ever so slowly, a gradual
sense of wrongness crept into me over what I did to Bobby.  I knew exactly what I had done, but I didn’t understand why.  Ninety minutes into my brisk walk I still hadn’t figured it out.

Bobby wasn
’t my partner.  He was my lover.  Someone with whom I kept house.  He wasn’t an Arm or an underling, though.  He was…there was no word for him.  No word and thus no fixed concept in my head for his status.  Thus the problem.

He couldn’t ever be a real challenge to me.  Not on his best day or my worst.  I was ‘boss Arm of all I surveyed’, period.  Then what
had I been thinking?  Had I been thinking?

No.

No no no no no!  I had done a Keaton on him.  To him.  I had taken him down for no reason, just to satisfy an emotional need about at the importance level of filing off a chip on the end of a fingernail.

I
had made a mistake.  God damn it!  This was the third mistake I had made with Bobby.  What the fuck was I thinking?  The first time, I had gone too far into Arm to notice how Bobby’s health had suffered trying to keep up with me.  Then Bobby got sick and I vowed to reclaim my shriveled human soul.  I had bought furniture, decorated, cooked.  I had even cleaned the house for a bit.  A couple of weeks after that, Greg’s incompetent effort to start a gym had blown up and I had realized how my willful disregard of my surroundings and my people had hurt both Bobby and my dream of a gym.  I also realized my survival required me to notice everything around me.  Since then, I had committed myself to being aware, and was becoming a hell of a lot better at it.

Now this.  Damn it, I couldn’t afford so damned many fuck ups!  And again,
I had done it to my sweet boy-toy man.

This time, my instincts told me, was the last.  M
istakes happen.  As Keaton had drilled into me, when you make a mistake you take ownership of it and you clean it up.

Ah, the
cleanup.  Big issue there.  My Arm instincts said ‘you trashed him, so take out the trash’.  Kill Bobby and dispose of him in my graveyard with the rest of my kills.  I had broken him, possibly irretrievably; death was his only way out, either direct suicide or ‘suicide by Arm’, by doing something stupid like trying to point a firearm at me and pull the trigger, or by trying to run.  So: dispose of him and move on to the next.

Fuck instincts.

I was better than that and I would make this work.

---

I found Bobby still curled in a ball in the bedroom, shivering.  I sat on the mattress beside him and marveled at his form, letting the love I remembered rattle around in my mind.  I hadn’t left a mark on his body.  I hadn’t needed to.

I
wouldn’t make up with him in any normal fashion, either.

“Sit up,” I said.  Affectionless.  He did so.  Hell, right now if I said ‘slit your throat’, he
would do so without hesitation.

I looked him over, closely.

His eyes were more than haunted.  Deep black circles nearly hid them, and not from what I had done earlier.  His muscle tone was off, low.  The pneumonia still lingered.  He hadn’t been getting enough exercise.  He cringed when I moved toward him even the slightest.  Reading him, I realized ‘suicide by Arm’ was a likely outcome of his current mental state if I didn’t do something to fix the problem.

“I’m an Arm.  You know that.”  I paused.  He became wary.  “You haven’t been taking advantage of the fact I’m an Arm, though.”

“Ma’am?”

Nope, no ‘Carols’ right now.  I
would have to earn my supposedly more comforting name back.

“Think.  Why am I angry?” 
My anger had passed, but he had no way to know.

“Because I haven’t done what you’ve asked of me, ma’am.  I promise, really promise, I’ll do…”

We didn’t need to go there.  I knew the routine by heart and it would go on indefinitely.  “Did you think you had to fulfill all my demands personally?”

I had, when I originally g
ave him his orders.  He didn’t have to know that, either.

Light dawned in his head.  “I c
an hire people?”

“You c
an hire people, but…”

More light dawned.  “But you’re the Arm and you can recruit people to help me.  For minimal pay.”

“Yes.”

He worked things through in his head, taking several minutes, part of which
involved screwing up his courage to make the necessary request.  “Ma’am…Carol?  I need a maid, a cook and a groundskeeper.  An accountant to work with me wouldn’t hurt, either.”  Just by putting himself together enough to ask properly covered over three quarters of the recovery he needed.

What I missed when I pulled a Keaton on Bobby was
the fact I had worked him beyond endurance over the past month.  His health still gave him trouble, and just keeping up with the books, as an untrained bookkeeper, occupied him from the time he awoke until the time he fell asleep, exhausted.  He hadn’t had time to do anything else.

“Good, good,” I said, nodding.  “I’ll get you the people you need.  You’re mine, Bobby.  You’re mine but you have to ask.”

“I’m yours,” he said.  Now I gathered him into my arms and rocked him.