Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (15 page)

Lori sniffed.  “Oh, it’s just whole wheat with blueberry yoghurt filling.”

Inferno was
strange
.

---

“So, Henry, which of them was it, Keaton or Hancock?” Lori asked.

Zielinski looked up from his cleaning job on the gas chromatograph in Lori’s Boston College basement lab.  For hours, he had been doing the separate – fix – analyze routine on his most recent samples from Hancock.  Three days of lab work on Hancock’s samples proved Hancock’s tainted juice from Monster Arms was indeed abnormal and her reaction to it not psychosomatic.  He would need months more work to calculate the minimum number of new juice fractions involved, and in what amounts.  However, he decided to leave any attempts to work out the chemical makeup of the new juice fractions to biochemists with time on their hands.  Biochemical analysis at that level was way outside of his area of expertise.
  He would pass the samples over to his friend and colleague Dr. Littleside in Denver, without mentioning the source of the samples.  He owed Littleside quite a few favors of this nature.

“You’re talking about what happened in California a couple of weeks ago?” Zielinski asked.

Focus Rizzari had waited on her question until she got him alone and relatively private.  She thought her household bugged.  Interesting.

“Yes.”  Focus Rizzari had shown up early today, likely to get a chance to buttonhole him.  Normally, Zielinski
worked the day shift in her lab and Focus Rizzari got the night shift.  Lori’s last teaching responsibility, office hours, ended at four PM, and between four and six, the Focus was impossible to find.

Zielinski closed up the gas chromatograph and turned to the Focus.  She wore her academic outfit, her dowdy clothing, fake glasses and bad makeup, all to reduce her Focus allure.  Her bodyguards today included two women: Terry Bishop, a normal and Tina Williams, a Transform, both young and absurdly athletic, along with two men, Steve Huddleston, a normal, and Jim Simpson, a Transform, equally young and absurdly athletic.  He now knew the Focus’s standard bodyguards by name; she preferred to work with bodyguards who were approximately her age, a personal peculiarity of hers.  None of the four in today’s crew was over thirty.  The Focus’s main partner in crime, Ann Chiron, was absent.

“Hancock,” Zielinski said. “But I didn’t get it from her, I got it from Tonya.”

“Tonya?” Lori turned stone faced.  “Okay, who else are you talking to besides me, and how often?”

“I don’t have anything regular set up with Tonya, but she, along with Flo” Focus Ackermann “are the ones I get my itinerant doctor assignments from,” he said.  Lori licked her lips and he felt the onset of a headache.  “I also report weekly to Keaton.”  He had talked to Keaton in person yesterday, instead of leaving his report with her answering service lady.  She had grilled him unmercifully on the gaps in his previous reports and his ongoing research on Hancock’s blood samples.

“You phone in reports to Keaton?” Lori asked, surprised enough to show it.  She motioned for him to come over to her desk and sit.  “What do you tell her about me?”

Oh.  Right.  Lori was a security conscious Focus.  Her fierce question was more than enough to remind him, and she put enough charisma behind her questions to ensure he answered.  “Keaton knows I share lab space with you and your main research topic at the moment is the physiology of Focus juice transfer.  Keaton’s instructions to me were ‘Don’t bother to fill me in on that crap’.”

“How about security?”

“Keaton has no interest at all in my observations on anyone’s security,” Zielinski said.  “She said, quote ‘since you can’t ever tell how many weapons I’m carrying to within a factor of three, don’t waste your time telling me about Hancock, the Focus or her bodyguards’ equipment.  You aren’t qualified’.”  The Focus’s bodyguards laughed.  The Focus tapped her fingernails on her desk.

“That wasn’t what she said,” Lori said, harsh enough to rock Zielinski back in his chair.  Top Focuses were almost impossible to lie to.

“I left out the expletives,” Zielinski said.  “If you don’t mind.”

Lori shrugged and looked off into space.  “I thought she was teaching Hancock how to be an Arm, not how to be a psychotic killer.”

“I’m not happy with Keaton’s training either, but we don’t know enough about Arms to say what normal Arm behavior is and what are Keaton’s personal quirks.”  He paused and decided he could expound a bit on the subject of Keaton’s training without violating his agreement with the Arms.  “Keaton’s trained Hancock to be an athlete and fighter, similar to your bodyguard training, except at a Major Transform level.”  Guns, knives, and gymnastics.  He wanted the details but neither of the Arms would talk on the subject.  Yet.  “Hard discipline is involved, quite brutal from what I’ve seen: cuts, bruises, even broken bones.  Hancock’s also been trained in many skills you could call espionage or criminal: breaking and entering, disguise work, tailing people and dropping tails.  All of those are needed for hunting down Transforms for their juice, so even the absolute Arm basics delve into gray areas.”

“So Hancock’s fully trained in Arm survival and so now Keaton’s torturing her and driving her insane?  How is this a good thing?” Lori asked.  The Focus’s bodyguards grew more nervous; Arms and their imagined skills were not what they wanted to hear about.

“Lori, that isn’t quite what I said,” Zielinski said, batting away the Focus’s charismatic jab.  “Hancock doesn’t think she’s fully trained.  She is far more interested in learning the rest of Keaton’s tricks than going independent.  She made that abundantly clear to me.”  He looked Lori in the eyes.  “Their relationship may not be the utter horror show you’re thinking it is.  Last time I talked to her Carol said she had convinced Keaton to upgrade their kitchen so Carol could, in her words, ‘cook those gourmet meals that both of us Arms have been lusting after’.  My guess is their relationship is far more complex than us outsiders can judge.”

“You’ve got to get her out of there before she becomes as nutso as Keaton,” Lori said.

Zielinski nodded, although such a mild charismatic order wouldn’t have any lasting effects.  Luckily, the Focus wasn’t going after him as fiercely as she had on the security issue.  “Carol is a quite different person than Keaton.  For one thing, she has a wicked sense of humor, which often leaves me in stitches, and in addition to being witty, she’s brilliant.  I suspect you’d like her.”

Lori glared.  “Okay, okay,” he said, unable to wiggle out from under Lori’s charisma this time.  “I’ll do what I can, but I can’t push Carol about her graduation.  Pushing an Arm isn’t something you ever want to do.”

“Fine,” Lori said.  “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some tests to run…”

Zielinski stood and caught the bodyguard’s reactions before they covered them up: amused and impressed, especially Terry and Steve, the other two normals in the room.  Focus Rizzari’s behavior was a bit rough, enough to make an unenlightened normal fawn in terror or, if they had any resistance to charisma, make them annoyed and angry.  He didn’t mind.  Other Focuses treated him far worse than this.

In his estimation, the Focuses weren’t half as civilized as they thought, and had no right to complain about the Arms.

Part 2
Confrontations and Consequences

“I am stricken dumb like a ewe lamb,

my arm is wrenched from its socket,

my foot sinks in filth,

my eyes blur from seeing evil,

my ears are closed from hearing the cry of bloodshed,

my heart is appalled at the thought of evil

when human baseness is revealed.

Then my foundations shudder

and my bones are out of joint.

My entrails heave like a ship in a slamming storm from the East.

My heart is utterly sore,

and in the havoc of transgression

a whirlwind swallows me up.”

– Psalm 10 of the Thanksgiving Psalms of the Essenes

Arms have the full range of human emotions.  They also have several more, none of which are fully understandable to the non-Arm.  Many have noted that Arms are often more friendly toward stinky smelly unwashed humans than toward sparkling clean and artificially scented humans.  However, only an Arm can understand what it means to experience the emotion of being with a human who is ‘scent open’ to them.

“The Book of Arms”

I climbed the rope to the second floor balcony of the small hospital and flipped over the railing to land on my feet.  My sword clanged softly on the metal railing and Keaton glared at me.  I put my hand on the sheath to quiet it and Keaton glided ghostly through the door and into the dark hospital corridor.  I followed, less ghostly, trying not to scratch at my moustache.

I still hadn’t figured out what the deal was with the Prussian army uniforms, complete with swords.  As a stealth disguise, it wasn’t worth shit.  This disguise attracted more attention than it turned away.

Keaton followed the corridor to its end, turned, glided another ten feet and turned again.  This corridor held a hospital orderly, sitting in a chair outside a door reading a lurid true crime novel.  Keaton twitched and covered the distance to the orderly in the bat of an eyelid.  A pommel to the temple and he fell, shocked at seeing two Prussian army officers, in full dress uniforms, bearing down on him.

Oh.  The story he told the authorities wouldn’t include two Arms.

Assuming he lived to tell any tales at all.  Blows to the head can be bad news and neither Keaton nor I bothered to check if he still breathed.

We set up outside the door and Keaton held up fingers: one, two, three.  We burst through the door with a bang.  The woman in the bed sat up, startled awake.  When she opened her mouth to scream, I put a gag in it, and tied it quickly behind her head.  Keaton stripped the blanket off the bed and tied the woman’s hands and feet in the minute amount of time it took me to gag the woman.

Done.  I smiled inside, surprised at the ease of our success.

Keaton smiled.  “Here we have Mary Fouke, the Arm.”

Mary Fouke was indeed an Arm, a very recent Arm, less than a day past her transformation.  Formerly a secretary at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, she caught the Shakes and took the rest of her small secretarial pool out in the process.  She appeared to be fifty years old and radiated first-rate battle-axe.  I had no idea how Keaton learned of her so quickly.

We ignored her screams and struggles and dumped her off the second floor balcony to the ground below.  Keaton and I jumped down after her and we landed on our feet.  I picked up Fouke, slung her thrashing body over my shoulders, ignored the shrieks coming from behind her gag, and loaded her into the car.

“Would you believe I’ve got an offer for $100,000 for this cunt?” Keaton said.

“Zielinski?”

Keaton snorted.  “A different Network doc, one worse off than Zielinski.”

Worse off than Zielinski?  I could hardly imagine.  “Ma’am, I think…”

Growl.  “If I cared what you thought I would have asked.  I’m not going to take the money.  I’m going to train her myself.”

Fuck.  I didn’t like this hard-edged and uncivilized new Arm.  Low class.  Not the sort of person I cared for, even as a normal.  She reeked of cigarette smoke and her makeup was all wrong, unless she painted her face to make her look nastier.

Besides, after what I had to go through to convince Keaton to train me, how did this bitch rate getting it free?  Hell, Keaton even
rescued
this sorry piece of ass.  I remembered the nerve wracking tension of my hard fought escape from the St. Louis Transform Detention Center and wanted to growl.

Keaton, of course, read my mind and reamed my ass about my less than stellar attitude all the way home.

---

“Me?  An Arm?  You’re crazy!  I just have the Shakes!”

I dumped her on the floor of Keaton’s gym and stood up.  Sneered.  This low class pushy overly nasal Yankee supercilious asshole bitch bothered the crap out of me.  I wound up to smack her.

Keaton stood beside me with her arms crossed.  Mary didn’t shut up.  “What’s wrong with you people?”  She looked at me.  I was wearing my Catholic schoolgirl uniform.  “Whadda you, the bull dyke’s halfwit flunky sex slave?”

I hauled off and clocked Fouke right across the face.  Something gave as I did, and the shape of her face shifted.

The next thing I knew, pain shot through me, across my ribs
, and I flew through the air.  I rolled when I landed, gasping for air, and found Keaton in my face with a knife at my throat.  Blood dripped off the left side of my face and down my back, ruining yet another Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

“She’s
mine
,” Keaton said.  “It’s
my
right to hurt her, and you damned well don’t go usurping my rights.  Got that, cunt?”

She stepped on my right foot, hard, and bones gave.  Agonizing pain.  “Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry ma’am.  I won’t do it again.”