In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (35 page)

“Evac!  Now!” I said, my best no-nonsense charismatic order.  Four more fire-and-drop rocket grenade launchers remained, and I blasted the giant turkey and two other Monster ladies before return fire from the armed part-Monsters forced me to drop my weapon cache and retreat.

I scanned around as I retreated upslope into the trees, making sure we didn’t leave anyone behind.  Geraldine carried Gilgamesh over her shoulder and Thelma carried Sky, and I hadn’t even asked them to do so.  Hank and Ann were right – anyone who thought Crows and Focuses shouldn’t be working together needed to see this instinctive bit of mutual protection in action.

Tom, stationed at the upslope edge of the clearing, noticed me start my retreat, and he opened up on the approaching pack with a belt-fed tripod-stabilized M-60 machine gun.  They dropped into cover, slowing their approach.  “Six,” I said, as I passed him, handing off the camera equipment to Ricky on the way by.

Tom knew my code, and on a count of six he picked up his weapon and did a crouching retreat to beyond where I had dropped and set up my M-60.  As soon as he moved, I started to fire, sending leaves, branches and blood flying.  We covered each other this way all the way back to the jeeps.  The first jeep had already bounced off back to the bus; the second waited for Tom and me.  We climbed in back, fed new belts into our M-60s, and put down some heavy covering fire as our jeep bounced off as well.

Two speedy chimp-Monster ladies caught up to us as we crossed the field, on the way back to the bus.  The first Tom and I blew into chimp bits, but I needed to abandon my weapon and leap off the jeep to fight the second, doing so with a shouted “E-3.”  The bus would leave without me.

I could cope.

Chimp-lady and I circled each other, feinting claws and knives, until I mastered her will, enabling me to dart in, slice open her throat with my long knife, and dart away before she even flinched.  Bullets zipped by me now, as the armed part-Monster ladies exited the forest behind me.  I took off, broken field running more literal than my usual, heading off at an angle behind the bus, trying to attract the pack’s attention.

My ruse worked; without their pack leadership their battle tactics were even more primitive than mine.  Unfortunately, I realized I was running out of time when I heard Odin’s battle roar well behind me, laden with enough juice to make me flinch.  I pulled pins from grenades and tossed them over my shoulder as I ran, setting up a nice distraction and wasting money I didn’t have.  When I reached the county road, five hundred yards behind the now fleeing bus, from where my troops fired at the remains of Odin’s pack, I turned, abandoned the rest of my non-bladed weapons, and started a burn-powered sprint for the bus.

Tom, showing again he was everything I hoped for in a number two, saw what I did and popped the bus’s back emergency exit just before I leapt the final feet into the vehicle.

“Odin’s given up,” Sky Crow-whispered from where he curled three seats ahead of me.  I feared he would need another Zielinski session to cure him from whatever he had done to himself, but although he remained a limp pudding of a Crow, he could still talk.  “He’s gathering his people and heading back to his farm.”

I did a quick scan of the bus, looking for trouble.  Plenty of blood and exhausted bodies draped across seats, but no deaders.  No wounds on either Focus.  Gilgamesh remained out cold from Wandering Shade’s attack, but he was alive and otherwise unharmed.  “Some help here,” Delia said, attracting my attention.  She wore a nasty wound on her upper right arm, bad enough I could watch the blood spurt as the bus bounced down the county road.  Since she was still conscious, she must have been shot just before she got to the bus, or perhaps while on the bus.  I counted enough bullet holes in the bus to support the latter theory.

I couldn’t afford to let Delia die.  Her death would wreck everything.  Instead, I would have to use a trick I futilely hoped to keep quiet.

You see, I had acquired myself a magic tongue.

---

“Thank the Lord,” Hank had said, when I finally got some leverage over the Eissler-style healing trick.  “I’d swear you were going to turn me into a goddamned scar factory before you figured this out.”

Since I had wanted to keep my experiments quiet, he had become my experimental test subject.  Served him right.  Karmic payback.  Every day, while I recruited Tom, I would come by his office, cut him, and try various things to heal the cut.  Each day he got crankier about the tests, not that I blamed him.  We tried laying on hands, bleeding my blood into his, meditative concentration, and a half dozen other things.  None of them worked.  Hank told me Arm healing was likely a psychologically dependent trick, and he predicted my ability to heal would be linked to my favorite pleasurable pastime.  I reluctantly agreed to try sex, but only after everything else failed.  Luckily for the world, I had felt a twinge in my tongue when I licked his wounds, so we were able to skip any experiments involving the rubbing of my privates on him.

Once I did a little healing, I needed to master it, because to start with, the trick wasn’t worth my effort.  To help me, he started to teach me what he termed ‘meatball surgery’ as well as advanced anatomy.  “This is a knowledge-based trick, and if you don’t know what you’re healing, and why, you’re as likely to kill whoever you’re trying to help as heal.”  No surprise there; nearly all the powerful Arm tricks relied on extensive knowledge.  I swear, though, every other word in Hank’s vocabulary while he taught me that meatball surgery crap was ‘adhesion’.  I learned to slowly lick closed minor wounds without burning juice, learned that anesthetic didn’t work once my tongue got involved, and to really heal someone else quickly I needed to burn juice.  As far as either of us could tell, if I had the time and the juice available, I didn’t have any limits on how much I could heal.

---

I was beside Delia immediately.  I started out by putting my thumbs and fingers on the appropriate pressure points to stop the blood from spurting.  I examined the wound, finding an entry point but no exit point, meaning a partly-spent bullet had hit her, stopped by her humerus.  I did a little poking and prodding, eliciting an ‘owwh!’ from Delia, enough to determine the bone hadn’t been fractured by the impact.

This wouldn’t work unless I did something I had hoped to avoid.  “Delia, I can heal you, but since you’re a Transform, I need to tag you first.”  I didn’t know I would need to tag her until I contemplated the healing, but my instincts knew.

The recent memory of the spurting blood filled Delia’s mind.  “Whatever it takes.”

Not an attitude I wanted to see in an ordinary Transform, but I could work with it.  “Say ‘I’m yours’.”

“I’m yours.”

“You’re mine.”  The juice moved.  I caught her eyes and went predator.  “You will forget the pain,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I cut with my already bloody knife, extracting the bullet.  Delia screamed.  Infection?  Pshaw!  My healing tongue would prevent any infections.  I licked, keeping a low burn going, my mind visualizing the anatomy involved in the healing operation.  The healing didn’t take long to complete, the worst being the cephalic vein, which the bullet had ruptured.

“This is amazing,” Geraldine said, after I finished.  “I had no idea anyone could do that, ma’am, much less an Arm.”

“Glad to be of service,” I said, wiping blood from my mouth and face with one of the few clean patches of my shirt.  I was a disgusting mess, covered with my blood, Delia’s blood, chimp lady blood, and God knew what else.  I had a long commentary prepared about balancing karma with my actions, but Sky tossed in one of his nastier verbal bombs before I said my piece.

“With the Commander, the amazing is to be expected,” Sky said.

Innocuous, right?  Never, from Sky.

Geraldine went white, goose pimply and sweaty palmed.  To my shock, she already knew about ‘the Commander’.  To her, ‘the Commander’ was something out of myths and prophesies, like King Arthur, or heaven forbid Jesus Christ – as well as something related to events from before either of our transformations.  As if someone unworthy had claimed the title and it hadn’t gone well.

“Only a few Crows call me the Commander,” I said.  Worried.  I wanted to thrash Sky, but that wasn’t going to happen, ever.  I gave Geraldine a studied look and realized that to get anything at all out of her on this subject, I would have to abuse my hospitality.  Thelma, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue, which led me to believe this was an East Region Focus
thing
.  Dammit!  “I don’t call myself that, but out of politeness I haven’t bitten the heads off of those Crows who use the term.”

Geraldine’s worried unquiet grew worse.  She now believed I was likely the legitimate Commander, based on my comment.  Crap.  I hated anything that even mildly smacked of the supernatural these days; my ‘magical thinking’ phase had
not
been a good time.

The only ray of sunshine in this mess was Geraldine’s horror that she might have ended up on the
wrong side
.  To whatever crap legend she believed, the Commander was the ultimate good guy, at least in the military-leader-style-of-good-guy sense of the word.  The corpses I would tread on were supposed to be the enemies of the Focus community.

We rode the bus back to Indianapolis, each locked in our own thoughts.  Sky recovered enough after an hour of sleep to crawl over to Gilgamesh and get my Crow partner back on his feet before we got back to our commandeered motel.  We got the pictures rush developed and sent copies of them and copies of the negatives off with Geraldine and Delia, who flew back to Philadelphia.  Thelma and her guards, with their own copies of the pictures and a set for Focus Fingleman, flew back to Houston.

I drove back with the Crows.  I had a Keaton presentation to give, and as always I needed their help.

Enkidu: November 16, 1968 – November 21, 1968

“Enkidu.”

He ignored the voice in his mind.

“Enkidu!”

He recognized something familiar in both the voice and the name.  The hungry dark called, though, and he ignored both the voice and the familiarity.

“
Enkidu
!  You fucking ignorant fucked up piece of shit!  You fucked up to beat all fuck ups, you’re fucking up now, and if you don’t quit fucking up you’re going to be a dead fuck up!”

Ah, that’s what the hungry dark was.  Death.  The darkness was calm and painless, but he knew it for an enemy.  He attempted to resist the call, and in exchange bought himself stupefying pain.

“Much better.  Keep resisting and we might even live through this.  No thanks to you and your fuck-ups.”

We?

“Yes, we.  You think anybody else gives a shit whether you die?”

We?

The voice rumbled an exaggerated canine sigh.  “Come on, asshole.  Get your mind engaged.  You’re going to need it all to get through this one.”

He remembered.  He had tried to talk to Odin about their Master, after their Master had publically rebuked Enkidu for his necessary rampage in Detroit.  He had hoped to enlist help, but Odin had greeted his first hints that their Master was a Crow as treason of the highest order.  Enkidu had discovered the hard way that he couldn’t beat Odin in a fight.

Odin had killed him.

“I told you, you were fucking stupid.  You fucked up.”

Yes.  Death.  Death happened to Chimeras who got stupid.  Maybe somebody would find his head and grow a new Chimera.  But wasn’t his mind supposed to be gone by now?

“Well, yes, but we’re not exactly going to play by the rules, now are we?”

Under the circumstances, he wasn’t going to argue.

“Good.  Let’s start with the basics.  What’s your name?”

Who are you?  Why are you helping me?

Another canine sigh.  “You figure it out.”

Thinking.  Hard work right now.  He did possess enough juice, though, to metasense that he lay in in a pool of élan.  Ah, the results of the élan explosion from his death.

He looked.  In the haze of élan surrounding him, he saw the pale figure of a ghost.  Four legs.  Wolf.  Piebald, brown and white.  It smelled of storms.

His own ghost.

Well, this was unusual.

“Good.  Now let’s get to work.  We don’t have much time before your mind escapes.  It’s a damned good thing Odin left you where you fell, so we have all this élan to work with.  Now, again, what’s your name?”

His name.  It was a hard question.  He would have to think in order to answer.  Enkidu.  My name is Enkidu.

“Good start.  Now tell me about your transformation.”

Another hard question.  I woke up from my transformation in 1966.  December of 1966.  Gilgamesh was there…

A scream interrupted his endless recitation of his memories, feelings, opinions, morals, priorities and everything else that made him
Enkidu
, more than a simple head restarting his Chimera life.

A female scream.  Then, “Cleo, I found him!  He’s over here!”

He looked over at the voice and remembered the Gal’s name.  Heidi.  She looked human, save for a set of cat eyes and ears.  The Enkidu ghost bowed to her, and faded away, Cheshire Cat style.  The other two ghosts, an implacable Torma and a frowning and unhappy Grendel, faded as well.  They had appeared only after the Enkidu ghost had told him about their lives and deaths.  Neither of the other two ghosts had ever spoken.