All Beasts Together (The Commander) (40 page)

“Neither am I, Sky.  Next to my peers.”  Oh
, right.  Sky remembered working through this logic, before.  Every time he thought about how many Focuses in the States were as good as Lori, or better, he had to fight off a panic attack.  This particular fact refused to stick in his memories.

Sky got up from his grovel, met Lori’s
hungry eyes, and kissed her.

“Oh, stop.  Really.”

He stopped.  He had friggen fallen for a bleeping stoplight and it was short-cycling.

“We need to figure out what to do with your ladies in Toronto.”

“I already know what to do with them.”

Lori frowned.  “It isn’t fair you get to continue doing what you’ve been doing while I get stuck here in Boston with nothing.”

“Not exactly nothing.”

Lori
’s cheeks turned bright red, and she carefully looked away from him.  She slid her right hand out of sight, behind her, attempting to be unobtrusive.  “Crow sense of smell is better than I thought.”

“If my effects linger with you, take a lover while I’m gone. 
If you are still interested in the other, there are more interesting magazines for that sort of things than Playboy.”  Yes, his Crow senses were quite perceptive.

If possible, Lori turned redder still.  “It’s not a lover I need.
  I have too many distractions in my life already.  What I need is love.”

Clunk.

This wasn’t worth the grief, Sky decided.  Let someone else break the ice.  Her ice.

Sky found himself at the door, looking back at Lori. 
Once upon a time she had control, over her face, body and mouth.  No longer.  Sky wasn’t sure he liked what he saw.  His putative ladylove had a slight problem with being just a tad self-centered.  “Perhaps someday you will find it.”

With that, he was gone.

Henry Zielinski:  February 3, 1968

Kisses covered his face.

Zielinski awoke with a start
and flicked the lights on.  Lori, buck naked, had her back turned to him, walking away.  She looked over her shoulder.  “Come on along, Henry. I have a big surprise for you.”

He guessed the time
to be about three in the morning.  Bob stuck his head out of his bunk, looked around, groaned and pulled a pillow over his head.  Zielinski got up, almost before realizing he was getting up.  He slept in old-fashioned pajamas, necessary in the frigid guesthouse.  He put on his glasses, slippers and robe as fast as possible, wondering what the hell Lori meant about a surprise, and why the nakedness.

He stalked behind Lori as she left the
guesthouse.  She skipped along ahead of him through the slush toward the main house, tossing rose petals behind her to land at his feet.  Something about the scene bothered him.  He picked up a rose petal.

Cartoon rose petal, missing all the details. 
A charismatic illusion, the best he had ever been caught up in.  Dammit, Lori.  He wanted training in charisma resistance, but not like this!

He couldn’t tell the difference between real and fake.
  He might even be sleeping, trapped in Lori’s dream.  He shuddered, mouth dry, afraid.  Annie did tricks like that, and far worse.  Could Lori?

Zielinski set his lips and jogged to keep up with Lori.  His slippers
soon soaked through, highly annoying.  No matter how he tried, he couldn’t penetrate her illusion.  Lori played him like a puppy; all he saw of her naked form was her backside, even when she turned a corner.

The scuttlebutt in the engineer group
said Lori had fallen for some guy but it hadn’t worked out.  She was either sexually frustrated or the reverse, sexually sated and misbehaving.  No one, not even Tina, had pieced the story together, but it did explain why the Focus had been so distracted recently, and working far below her normal levels of efficiency.

Given the complexity of this illusion he decided she wasn’t distracted any longer.

Lori’s naked form lured him to the stairway leading down into the basement of the main house, where she kept the lab.  A set of muddy footprints led to and from the stairway down to the lab, large boot prints, slushy.  Dolly tracks, as well.  Lori’s naked footprints lay small and delicate on top of them.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs and turned left, he
spotted Lori in a hazardous materials suit, zipping up the front.  She managed the timing perfectly, so he got a glimpse of her flat belly and belly button and nothing lower.  No more of her breasts than she revealed in a low cut evening gown.  She turned and tossed one last set of rose petals over her shoulder, and dropped a plastic shield over her face.  Reached inside a toolbox and took out a bone saw.

S
till a show.

Zielinski followed as she led him along the muddy trail into Containment One, where who knows how many Monster autopsies and vivisections had occurred over the years.  Containment One had its own air circulation system and enough sterilization mechanisms to make Florence Nightingale blush.  Lori called this her Chamber of Darkness and
the place reeked like one of Keaton’s goddamned lairs.

The subject at hand was not on the autopsy table, but beside it, in a
Monster-sized metal crate.  Lori stomped a red button on the wall and the autopsy table retracted down toward floor level.  Hank tried not to think about the capital costs involved in setting up Containment One, likely enough to support several normal Focus households for a year.  “I’ve got a present for you, Henry,” Lori purred, rich enough to rouse even his over-aged male equipment, and he wished he wore more than a set of PJs and a robe.  Or that his feet weren’t growing more numb by the second.  “You’re not going to believe this, not at all.”

Behind him, Tina crept into Containment One in her robe, all goggle
-eyed and well-armed.  Zielinski read in her posture who she protected here, and from whom.  She thought her Focus had gone around the bend.

Lori popped the clasps on the box and
foggy frigid air seeped out from what had to be dry ice.  With casual indifference, Lori flipped the box lid open on its hinges, to reveal…

She stepped in his way and shook an index finger at him.  “So, Henry, why aren’t you in a containment suit?  Come on, off with the robe.”  She put a containment suit in his hands.  Hank turned away from the Focus, took of
f his robe, and slipped on the containment suit.  He stopped suddenly and thought.  His privates shouldn’t be feeling
colder
inside a containment suit.

Lori had rolled him
.  He would end up doing a Monster autopsy buck naked if he couldn’t find a way to break through the Focus’s charisma.

Now.

Tennis balls.

Sam served to him, at the racket club.  Rose hadn’t happened yet.  President Kennedy still lived.  His family remained intact.  “We need a new set of tennis balls,” Sam said.  Hank went over to his gym bag, fished around for a new canister of tennis balls.  Got one out, and opened it.  Took out two, sniffed the first.  The faint paint odor of new tennis balls, overwhelmed by scents of rubber and fabric, tickled his nose.  Ahh.  He loved the smell.  “Go on and serve, dad,” Sam said, impatient.

Tennis balls.  The memory of odors broke through, always the most reliable.

There was no containment suit.

“Nice try, Lori, but it didn’t work.”  Besides, he knew where Lori kept the containment suits.  He walked over, got one, and put it on after wiping his feet dry.  He turned to Lori, but she ignored him, shoveling dry ice into a bucket.

Tina
stared at them in open-mouthed amazement.

He walked over to the
huge box, noticed clasps on the side facing the autopsy table.  He started shoveling ice, until he joggled one of the Monster’s insectiod limbs.  It wiggled.

“Back,” he
said, with
that
voice.

Lori stepped back.  “What?” she said, annoyed.  Tina, having never seen a normal command her Focus, dropped to sit on the floor.  Floored.

“That’s no Monster.  That’s a Chimera or Sport.”

“Yes, Henry,” Lori said.  “I know that already.  Read this.”  She handed Zielinski a note.

Hi hon
,

You’ll just love this.  This is now the fourth Chimera I’ve confronted in my young life as a Major Transform.  This one I killed.  Ugly sucker, isn’t he?  Consider this a present out of the goodness of my heart.  If you can ever get that twink Dr. Zielinski away from his research projects, share it with him.  I owe him as well.  Someday, we will all meet again, all the world’s Chimeras notwithstanding.  PS  Crows can normally spot these suckers miles away, but someone was hiding this one from my Crow and me until he got within point blank range.  Watch out for the bad guys!

Carol

Zielinski shivered in sudden fear for Carol.  Fourth Chimera?  She didn’t have Keaton’s experience, and if several of these Chimeras ganged up on her, she would lose, perhaps fatally.  He needed to go help her!

He couldn’t, though, without violating Anne-Marie’s
trust in him.  This must have been what she had seen: the Chimeras were after the Arms.  The urge to go help Carol almost overwhelmed him.

What sort of a hold did Carol have on him, anyway?
  Her hold was clearly larger than the Focus’s; his inappropriate desires for Lori had fled over the months, chased away by the inexplicable changes he had seen in her.  He had desired the cold emotionally shuttered Focus, desires that lessened the more she had opened her emotional shutters.

“This was delivered by a non-network Focus who lives in Milwaukee
,” Lori said.  She smiled, eyes vacant.  “She likes me.”

She likes me?  Lori wasn’t talking about the Focus in Milwaukee, but about Hancock.
  Lori’s words brought an echoing smile to his face, his compatibility hypothesis proven.

She
backed toward the container.  “Come on, Henry.  We’ve got an autopsy to start.  This thing is going to turn into sludge soon.”

Behind her, the creature raised itself up from the box.  Zielinski’s heart leapt to his throat.  “Lori!  Tina!”  Too late: the Chimera beheaded Lori with one swipe of his tentacle,
her head and body hit the floor with a sickening bounce, to roll separate directions.

Zielinski fell back, heart pumping away at far too dangerous a rate.  He landed on the floor with a little thump, the world dimming.

Dammit.

Okay.  Where
’s the sickening burned juice odor of a dead Focus?  He had smelled that one before, when a Focus’s brain had exploded nearly into his face.

No
odor.

Dammit, another charismatic illusion.  This time Lori got him good.

“Lori,” he said.  “Nice illusion.  You missed the stench of dead Focus, though.  Tina, if you haven’t had a heart attack from all of this, please answer me: did you tell the Focus about the poker games in Bob’s Barn?”  Did Lori consider his poker playing skills a challenge to her?

“Uh,” Tina said.  “Illusion?  Charisma?  You’re not dead, Focus?”

“I had you both going on that one,” Lori said.

“Well, yes,” Zielinski said, and stood
on shaky feet.  “You almost had two Chimeras to deal with, though.  Occum, with his Crow metasense, managed to find out why I’m still having juice issues: half my adrenal gland transformed on me when the assassins injected me with Monster juice.  Nothing else, just half of my adrenal gland.”

“Why Chimera?” Lori asked.  The scene was almost too cute.  Lori stood next to the
Chimera box.  At her feet lay her headless corpse, or at least the illusion of her headless corpse.  She had rolled her illusory decapitated head over to Zielinski’s feet.  Lori hadn’t put much into the head.  The illusion had her face, but instead of eyes, it had the cartoon x’s that marked cartoon corpse eyes.  One eye winked at him, and the dead tongue lolled out of the mouth periodically and lay fetchingly, then would retract slowly and cycle again.  She had created a programmed looping juice pattern-backed charismatic illusion.

Oh, the papers he could write if he still had a career!

“Cut up junior here and I’ll show you,” Zielinski said.  “Actually, since you’re the one with the biochem lab where you work, I’ll make a prediction: when you run junior’s blood you’re going to find somewhere between ten to a hundred times the adrenaline you would expect from a male Transform who died in a fight.”  Similar adrenaline coursed through his own system.

Zielinski glanced over at Tina,
who had crawled into a fetal ball.  “Lori, you might want to consider doing something with Tina.”

“Besides writing her up for dereliction of duty?  My bodyguards are supposed to be
able to punch through illusionary charisma attacks like that.  My training.”

Zielinski blinked
and shrugged.  Lori was amped tonight, functioning well above her norms.  He didn’t want to get into a discussion about why or how, though.  Too many bad avenues involving interpersonal relationships of a sexual nature, conversations he had no interest in holding with the Focus.