Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (16 page)

“Damned straight you won’t,” she whispered in my ear.  She stepped on my other foot and bones snapped there as well.  I gasped and tried to control the pain, but tears dripped from my eyes.  “You don’t touch her.  You don’t threaten her.  You don’t hurt her in any way.  She’s
mine
.  You try any shit with her and I’ll give you some serious attention.  Comprende?”

“Yes ma’am.  I’m sorry, ma’am.  I won’t do it again.”  Keaton stepped back and I fell to my knees, glad now to be free of the excruciating pain in my feet.  I put my head to the floor, hoping the gesture of humility would appease her anger.  “I promise, ma’am.  I’ve learned better.”  I hadn’t experienced rage like
Mary roused since the Detention Center, but after a moment’s grovel, I recognized the source.  Mary was competition, another Arm.

“All right, dipshit,” Keaton said.  For a moment, I thought she talked to me, but I lifted my head and saw she faced Mary.
“This is how it’s going to be.  You…”

“Don’t you dare call me a dipshit,” Fouke said, interrupting Keaton.  “I’m a…”  I couldn’t believe anyone in their right mind would interrupt Keaton in her current mood, but there Fouke was.  Her complaint ended with the crack of a blow across her cheek, applied by Keaton’s hard hand, right to same place I had applied mine.  Blood dribbled from the corner of Fouke’s mouth.

“Pay attention when I talk to you,” Keaton said, her voice deadly soft.  “You’re an Arm now.  Get used to it.  You feel a hunger inside you, baby Arm?  You want something you’re not getting?”

“Yes, I want something I’m not getting, dearie,” Mary said, her voice blurred from a jaw which didn’t quite work for her.
“I want a fucking cigarette.”

Smack
.  Her head snapped over at Keaton’s blow.

“You will be respectful,” Keaton whispered in that predator’s voice.

“
You
go fuck yourself.”

Smack
.  Then more.  Mary screamed and the blood flew.  Keaton didn’t stop beating her until Mary passed out.

“You’re
crawling
?”  I barely understood Fouke’s words through the effects of Keaton’s beating.

My face burned and a bundle of
black rage knotted my stomach.  Mary lay under the squat rack, shackled to it by her ankle.  Her face purpled with bruises and one eye had swollen shut.  There were other injuries.  A lot of them.

Keaton was out.  To do whatever business normally took her out of the warehouse during the day, or maybe to cool off.  I didn’t know.  I still wore my
ruined Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

I hated foot injuries.  They hurt like hell and the feet
were useless until they heal.  Fortunately, the damage was limited to a couple of green-stick fractures.  Also fortunately, as an Arm I healed far faster than a normal.  I would be walking without a limp in a few days.  Until then, though, I hobbled about on my knees, hauling a bucket of water to clean up Mary’s bloody mess.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said.  I snarled predator at her, which startled her for a moment.  I pulled the sponge out of the bucket, squeezed it out, and started cleaning up the dried blood.

My momentary predator gaze’s effect didn’t last long.  “Why do you stand her?  She treats you like a dog.  That sponge you’re using has more spine than you do.”

Rage rose to black out the edges of my vision and I wanted to hit her so badly my hand twitched, scattering bloody, soapy water across the blue mat.  My lips pulled back and a growl rose from deep in my chest.

“Like this right here,” Mary said.  “You’re so mad you could hit me, but she told you not to.  So I can lay here and insult you all day and you won’t do a damned thing about it.”

I took a deep breath and did my best to ignore the fucking bitch.  She fought Keaton, so she wanted to manipulate me and take one of Keaton’s tools out of action, or, better yet, make me a tool in her own hand.  She played games with my head
, but I didn’t need to play along.

I mopped up blood.  My hand still shook.

“You’re nothing more than an animal,” Mary said.  “You’ve given up all pretense of self-respect.  Look at you.  She can make you do anything!  You’ve got no morality of your own.  You’ve got no will.  You’re barely human.  I’m embarrassed to belong to the same species as you.  What happened to your pride?  You’re even crawling around on all fours like an animal!”

If I didn’t channel my rage into something useful, I would burst.  Carefully, slowly, I shifted my weight onto my hands.  Rolled forward and lifted my feet off the floor.  Brought them up high above me, until I stood on my hands.  Once on my hands, I shifted my weight again until I put all my weight on my left hand, allowing me to hold the filthy sponge with my right.  With my feet in the air and standing on my hands, I scrubbed.

Mary fell silent for a moment.  “So why don’t you do something that means something?” she asked.  “Symbolic gestures don’t mean anything unless you back them up with real deeds, twat.”

That did it.  I hand walked over to her and flooded my entire emotional baggage into my predator effect.  “You’re going to die, bitch,” I said.  She peed herself and ran her legs as if she pumped a bicycle downhill.  “Slooowly.  And I’ll laugh when I clean up what Keaton leaves behind of your…”

“Hancock!”

Keaton.

I turned and figured I would have to suck shit again.  Keaton just laughed.  “Get the fuck out of here and go hunt.  I want some alone time with my new punching bag.”

I didn’t have to be told twice.  I got.

---

My third day of hunting took my limping body to Detroit.  I found my target in Ypsilanti, a young mother with juice problems, but she refused to cooperate.  She and her kids lived in one of those small Levittown-like houses in a suburb of the same.  No man around, lucky for me.  The mother, my kill, stayed in bed, sick.  Lucky for her she had three kids, ages running about five to ten, bouncing around the house and watching TV, keeping me at bay.

She was too sick to send her kids out to play on this beautiful Saturday morning, so I decided I needed to force the issue.  I left my ride parked along the side of one of the roads that led into the subdivision and limped near her house.  The subdivision was new, surrounded on three sides by open fields, all fully spring green.  I shuffled along the sidewalk as if I belonged there and slipped into the still immature bushes around the house when no one watched, careful to hide my tracks so they wouldn’t be seen.

As I rounded the back corner of the woman’s house things became wild.  The woman practically flew out of her bed as the juice inside her churned and writhed and convulsed.  Before she took three steps her internal juice structure collapsed.  It was an engrossing display.

In a disgusting sort of way.

Screams started up inside the house, first a tortured furious scream, that of my kill.  Followed by the screaming of children and the slamming of furniture.  The screaming of the children stopped, one chilling silence after another.  I looked around and saw one, then two, then three
dammit
neighbors coming out of their houses or sticking their heads out their windows, looking this way.  I wouldn’t be able to take my kill with all these people watching.

The woman ran through the front door, spraying splinters and startling me.  She was a horrible sight, carrying a bloody knife, covered in blood herself.  She held a haunch of meat in her mouth, chewing, to my disgust
, a child’s arm.  My kill clutched the arm with misshapen fingers and bloody fissures covered her skin.

I froze and hesitated.  My kill had turned Monster on me.  Double damn it!

I had become callous during my long months as an Arm, but this revolted me.

Little
Miss Monster, a half head shorter than myself, turned to the first sound she heard, a curse from the man next door.  The Monster charged the man, who turned to run far too late.  She slit his throat, hacking him to bloody bits, and continued to hack as she screamed her triumph to the neighborhood.

All around doors and windows slammed shut and phones picked up to call in the emergency.  The Monster paid no attention, engrossed in her kill.  Thirty seconds later she got up again and looked around for a fresh victim, screaming again in fury.  Seeing no one, she went into the house next door.

Dammit!  The Monster was still my kill.  My juice monkey and I wanted her badly.  A child lived in the next-door house, a small infant.  In a moment, the Monster would kill the kid, along with the child’s young mother.

I sprinted as best I could after the Monster, unsure of my motives and plan.  Ever since Monster Arms I had despised the horrid things.  I certainly
hadn’t liked them before my transformation.  I refused to let that
thing
kill any more children!

I caught up with the Monster as she howled triumph again, this time over the young mother, now
reduced to little more than a bloody mess.  Despite my noiseless approach, the Monster turned on me and charged.

As Keaton would say: Fuuuuuck me.

The Monster’s charge lifted me off my feet and slammed me into a wall.  I sliced and diced as she held me there, and the odor of her juice triggered my juice drawing instincts.

Oh, was that a mistake.  I knew this was no place to be taking a kill, not with the police on the way.  My instinct-driven body didn’t get the memo, though.

Monster juice is beyond foul.  My skin crawled, my stomach rebelled, I got a blinding headache, and that was before I finished the draw.  Worse, the Monster didn’t freeze up as I drew her.  Usually, when I juice sucked a victim, she would freeze the instant I started my draw.  This one came after me with her knife.  She actually cut me before I finished my draw.  I kept on carving her as I drew.

I’ll tell you, fighting while taking a draw wasn’t one of the combat forms Keaton taught me.  I
wasn’t sure I wanted to practice it, either.

I vomited on the amazingly still living Monster as I finished my draw.  My draw did its work and the Monster fell to the carpet a moment later, finally dead.  Unlike any of my previous kills she splashed when she hit the ground, hands, arms, feet, legs and body organs flying every which way.  I kicked intestines away, then yelped in terror and took a step back when the intestines began to slither away on their own,
snake like.

I finally got smart and ran, ignoring the pain in my feet.  I began to worry, and not just about the police.  My muscles wouldn’t stop twitching.  Worse, my nerves fired with an itchy, crawly sensation, like something unclean lived in my skin with me.  Worse than worse, the world began to turn funny colors.  Hallucinations.

I should have been unconscious from the post-kill effect, and I couldn’t tell my juice level at all.  My post-kill lust was also abnormal: I wanted to peel my skin off with my fingernails and cause myself pain.  I swore ants crawled around under my skin and bugs crawled around in my mind.  If I cut my skull off, my brain would be a mass of maggots.  My skin covered worms and snakes, not bones and organs.

At least the worst of the hallucinations held off for an hour, long after I lost anyone stupid enough to track me.  That’s when I lost track of time and events.  I’m not sure what I did, if anything, until about noon the next day.

---

My shoes made a little tic-tic noise in my nightmare as they tried to stick to the cheap chemicals in the carpet.  Keaton grunted “Take advantage of your opportunities, and I’ll be back in a few hours” before she left.

A decidedly nervous looking young man lay on the bed in the cheap motel room.  He was about twenty or so, thin, and needed a shower…yesterday.  I didn’t know how Keaton got him here but at least he didn’t try to leave.

I saw him and I wanted him.  I shucked my clothes as fast as I could and landed on the bed with him.  He spent a lot of time and effort making me happy.  After a while of enjoying my own pleasure, I recovered from my first Keaton
-supplied kill enough to make sure he enjoyed himself as well, and afterwards we had several hours of wild, rollicking, playful fun.  He laughed and played, and his endurance was good, even for a young man.  I really, really enjoyed myself.

Keaton came back while we were still entwined.  She didn’t bother to knock.  The boy and I unglued hurriedly, and I stood up.  The boy tried to cover himself with a sheet.

“Okay. Fun’s over,” she said, and turned to the boy. “What’s her name?”

“Carol,” he said, staring at Keaton with wide eyes.

She turned to me and handed me a gun I didn’t know she had.  “Kill him.”

I hesitated.  Keaton got in my face, glaring.  All thought and emotion fled from me, save one: obey.  I took the gun with its funny attachment on the front that I learned later was a silencer and I shot the boy right through the forehead.  His brains splattered all over the pillow.  I froze, disgusted at myself.  Keaton always made me destroy everything that was beautiful and sweet and gentle.

Keaton slapped me.  I slugged her.

We fought and she beat the crap out of me.  From down on the floor, licking her boots and in horrible pain, I eventually apologized and said I would never hesitate when she gave me an order again.