Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (32 page)

John Doe lay still for a long time.  Upstairs, Gilgamesh heard the kids playing some awful modern music on a battery-powered radio.  Some singer went on and on about ‘satisfaction’, and how he couldn’t get any.  Gilgamesh grimaced at the throbbing beat and looked back automatically from the filthy window, to check on John Doe.  This had to be over soon.  If not, Gilgamesh would abandon the man and go.  Of course, he had vowed to leave the day before, and the day before that…

John Doe looked back at him with wide brown eyes.  His juice still roiled, unsettled, but he was awake.  Gilgamesh’s heart leapt into his throat and he tensed.  His own juice churned, threatening to come up.

“Where am I?” John asked, his voice hoarse.  He didn’t move from where he lay under the tattered blue blanket.  He appeared forlorn lying on the bare mattress, gaunt from his sickness.  Gilgamesh waited for him to show the terrible panic, but it didn’t come.

“You’re in hiding,” Gilgamesh told him, gently, careful not to startle the man.  “You have the Shakes.”  The man didn’t panic.  Gilgamesh wished he remembered his own transformation, remembered when the panic started.  John’s transformation wasn’t through with him, though.  Perhaps this was a part of the transformation Gilgamesh no longer remembered.

The man tried to sit up in bed and failed.  He fell back with a moan, rolled over on his stomach and dry heaved over the edge of the mattress. The blanket fell away and exposed a long narrow back, shivering with the man’s retching.

Bah.  So much for airing out the place.

“Damn.  I hurt like hell and my head feels like someone ran a buzz saw through it,” the man said, still face down over the edge of the mattress.  He rested for a couple minutes before turning back to Gilgamesh, spots of saliva still caught in John’s scruffy brown beard.  Gilgamesh huddled in the corner, motionless since the man awoke.

“Who are you?” the man asked.
“What is this place? This isn’t a hospital.”

Gilgamesh waited a moment, until he was sure the man
had finished talking.  This man made him nervous.  “You can call me Gilgamesh.”

“Gilgamesh, huh?  Like in that old story?  My name’s…”

Gilgamesh cut him off, shocked that some random Transform knew the reference.  “Don’t tell me your name.”

“What?”

“Pick a new name for yourself.  Don’t tell anyone your old name.  Names tell
them
too much about you.”

The man glared at Gilgamesh in disbelief.  His face paled behind the scruffy brown of a week’s worth of beard.  “What’s going on here?” the man asked.

“Do you have an extra sense, John Doe?  Can you close your eyes and sense me?  Can you sense the Focus to the northeast?  Can you sense the little collections of juice and fog all around you?”

“What’re you talkin’ about?” the man mumbled.  Still, he closed his eyes and concentrated.

A moment later, he opened his eyes with a start. “What the hell am I sensing?  There’s stuff all around!  I can see it!  Only I don’t
see
it.  It’s like I know it in my head, but it’s not going through my eyes.”  This time the man tried to sit up in bed and succeeded.

Gilgamesh nodded.  “You have Transform Sickness and you’re a Major Transform.  Your new sense is called…”

The man interrupted him.  “Only women get the metacampus and the metasense.  Are you trying to say I’m a Focus?”

Gilgamesh waited a moment before answering.  He wasn’t sure what was more annoying, the fact John knew the ‘metasense’ term or John’s pushiness.  “If you’ll listen for a moment, I’ll tell you.”

The man had the grace to be embarrassed.  He leaned back against the wall, pulled the thin blanket around him, and did the zipper-mouth pantomime.

Gilgamesh relaxed, sat down near the door, and gave him the full story.

The man listened quietly, shivering in his blanket.  “I’m hungry,” he said, when Gilgamesh finished, and so Gilgamesh fed him the remains of his last stale loaf of bread.  The man ate it and glanced around for more, still hungry.

“What about my former life?  My family, friends and colleagues?” John Doe said.  When the new Transform paid attention, he talked like an educated man, which he likely had been.

“You’ve been transformed and reborn,” Gilgamesh said.  “It’s going to hurt, hurt a lot, but you can’t go back and contact them.  Doing so would endanger them and endanger you.  Your old life is over.”

His John Doe wiped moldy breadcrumbs from his hands and shredded the bread bag
as he frowned.  “This craving.  Ah.  The dross stuff.  Can I get some?”  The man studied the pieces of shredded plastic in his hands.  “It’s like I’ve got this hunger inside of me.  I’m hungry for food.  But I’ve got this other hunger for this stuff I’m, uh, metasensing.”

Gilgamesh nodded, sadly.  “The craving.  We’ll go out this evening.”

John Doe could barely move, making the early part of their evening trip out an
ordeal.  He whimpered at the pain of his steps, but once he realized what he was doing he stopped, his face lined by deep creases.  John Doe wrapped the blanket around him, trying to keep warm.  They walked north and a little west, to avoid downtown Chicago.

At the far edge of his range, Gilgamesh metasensed the other Crow pacing them, ducking closer before skittering away.  Ignoring the other Crow, Gilgamesh took John to the Chicago Transform Clinic, fifteen blocks west of the Loop.  Nominally, the Clinic was located in the other Crow’s territory, but he hadn’t taken the dross.  John shuffled along, slowly, and he startled with every nearby noise or car brake.  He wasn’t good with the panic either: Gilgamesh swore John Doe’s first instinct was to flee
toward
the noise.  The trip took far longer than Gilgamesh expected, but he finally led John to a spot in an alley on the other side of the street from the Clinic, behind The Sportsmen’s Park Race Track.  Brick walls lined the wide alley, the monotony broken by two doors and no windows.  Dodging potholes and garbage cans, Gilgamesh wondered if the Sportsman’s Park raced horses or dogs.  Not cars, not with the overwhelming animal stench of the place.

“Take the dross,” he said, nodding toward the Transform Clinic.  At a hundred yards, Gilgamesh would only waste about half of the dross when he drew.

John frowned in incomprehension as he shivered in his blanket.  After a moment of thought, he reached out and drew in the dross.

Or tried.  John pulled, but he only got small sips and the rest slipped out of his grasp,
like water dripping through his fingers.  So much mess for so little reward.  He continued, flailing away, the craving eating at him, but he got almost nothing.

“Stop,” Gilgamesh told him, his childlike clumsiness too painful for Gilgamesh to watch.  “Your metacampus isn’t fully developed yet.  This will get easier later.”

“I need this stuff
now
, damn it!”  He slammed his fist against the brick behind them.  John’s face twisted with frustration and he slammed his fist against the brick wall again.  This time his hand started to bleed.  He grabbed one of the garbage cans, threw the can against the wall and kicked the garbage can again when it came bouncing back.  He kicked the garbage can again, after it stopped, and started swearing.  Rocks and cobbles went flying next.

A minute or two into John’s rage, a security guard showed up.  Gilgamesh faded around the corner, out of the security guard’s sight, and watched from a safe distance.  He metasensed the other Crow, fearful, at the edge of his range.  Gilgamesh wished he could join the other Crow.

“What’s going on here?” the guard said, all professional competence.

John Doe turned to the guard, the dented garbage can in both of his hands.  Of all things, he charged right at that guard, yelling at the top of his lungs and waving the trashcan around like a weapon.

The guard ran and Gilgamesh moved farther back, ready to run.  For all he knew, John would come after him next.  This wasn’t normal Crow behavior, no, not at all.

“Whooo!” John shouted.  “Did you see that guy run?  He ran like a goddamned deer.  I bet he never forgets running away from me!”  John paused.  “Hey Gilgamesh!  Let’s get out of here.  I bet that guy’s calling the cops.”

Gilgamesh winced to hear his name bellowed out for the entire city to hear.

“Gilgamesh!  Where are you?”

Dammit.  If this insane Crow would just remember to use his metasense, he would know exactly where Gilgamesh was and then he wouldn’t need that idiotic shouting.  Gilgamesh moved back closer again just to get John to quiet down. “Shhh.  We have to get out of here.”  Off in the distance, he heard sirens.

“Yeah.  That’s what I was saying.  Did you see the guy run?”

“Yes, yes.  Let’s get out of here.  No! Not that way.”  The sirens were that way.  “This way.”

They ran, back in towards downtown.  Gilgamesh ran slowly and easily, and John Doe panted and gasped behind him.  He had lost the blanket, but the running kept him warm.  Gilgamesh swore to himself about the lost blanket.  That wasn’t something he would be able to easily replace.

Gilgamesh turned them north to avoid the steady stream of sirens, deep into the territory of the other Crow.  The other Crow ran as well, slower than before, as if wounded or sick.  Gilgamesh suspected the other Crow had exhausted his juice.  At least the other Crow was smart enough to avoid John’s mess.

Five minutes later, as they slowly overtook the other Crow, the Crow stopped.  Then he went down, as if he were climbing down into something underground, a basement, or an underpass.  His home, probably.  The other Crow huddled for a moment, sicked up, and after a short pause, sicked up again.

Gilgamesh worried about this other Crow, so close to withdrawal.  He shivered so hard Gilgamesh could sense his shivers four miles away.

The other Crow picked up something in his shaking hands and held it to him.  Gilgamesh couldn’t imagine what was so important to a man in his condition.

Gilgamesh turned aside.  “This way,” he said to John, behind him.  They had scared the other Crow needlessly.  They were far enough from the sirens.

As they turned, the Crow took whatever was in his hand and pointed it at his head.  For a moment, his hands stopped shaking.  Then he tightened the index finger of his right hand.

“Shit,” Gilgamesh said as he stopped, in sudden realization.  He sensed a momentary flash, as the man’s head fragmented from the gunshot.

An instant later Gilgamesh winced as the death of th
e other Crow overwhelmed his metasense.  The explosion of dross and juice was so huge and painfully brilliant, more than after one of Tiamat’s kills.

Behind him, John Doe stopped and stared in the direction of the Crow.  “What the hell is
that
?”

Gilgamesh couldn’t speak, overcome with remorse.  The other Crow must have lived week after week in the grip of his miserable panic, unable to control himself, consumed with the incredible craving of low juice, tortured by terror, all day, every day.

The panic almost took
him
when John Doe ran off.

“Come back here,” Gilgamesh said, a low whisper, as John headed off through the downtown skyscraper canyons toward the dead Crow.  “What do you think you’re doing?”

Four blocks away already, John Doe ignored him.  With each block, he ran just a little faster.  Sweat dripped from him, and he sounded like a steam engine as his breath came in huge gasps.  Gilgamesh followed, incredulous.

“Stop, dammit!  What do you think you’re doing?”

John Doe either ignored him or didn’t hear.  Gilgamesh trailed behind him, wondering what he would do when he caught him.

As John ran, he continued to speed up.  His breathing changed to become deeper and slower, and his legs pumped as if he had become an athlete.  He whimpered as he ran, as if his bodily changes hurt him terribly.  But still he ran.  Gilgamesh ran faster after him and closed the gap.

They left the skyscrapers of downtown behind a mile later, and passed under the El into a district of warehouses and smaller shops.  After crossing a ten lane boulevard, John Doe screamed and half stumbled, allowing Gilgamesh to catch up to him.  John’s speed increased again after the stumble; with inhuman speed, legs pumping like pistons, John sprinted away from Gilgamesh and left him far behind.

Gilgamesh followed as fast as he could as John approached the place w
here the Crow’s dross lingered, thick and rich and uncontained, like the dross of a Monster.  The area where the Crow died was an area of once elegant townhouses, now converted to winter-weathered apartments.  From a half mile back, Gilgamesh metasensed what John did when he reached the Monster-like dross.

John scooped up the Monster-stuff wholesale and took the foul mess into himself, scattering thin remnants of dross everywhere.  So fast, so incredibly much that Gilgamesh couldn’t believe John could hold it all.  John laughed, dousing himself in it, drunk on what he drew.  The remnants John left were the sort of dross that Gilgamesh would normally take, which left Gilgamesh to wonder what John consumed.

Damn.  The Crow had been afraid of the two of them as they approached.  The poor Crow, who didn’t metasense Gilgamesh until he got within three miles, had picked up John at full range.  He must have thought they were chasing him.  He might still be alive if Gilgamesh had enough sense to stay away.