Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (39 page)

“Ah, so you drove one into withdrawal and didn’t take all his élan?”  Wandering Shade asked.

“Yup.  Uh, correct, boss,” Enkidu said.  He put down his food bucket and slid it across the floor to his Gal 2, a monkey-shaped creature with vicious teeth, who grabbed the bucket and began to gulp down raw pork gobbets.  “I stuck him down with the unsalvageable Gals to find out if by some chance he regenerated his juice.  Instead of regenerating his juice, he did something completely new: he stabilized.  I got another one and did the same thing, but didn’t keep him down with the Gals.  Guess what?  He died like a psycho normally does.”

Wandering Shade got up and paced, scattering Cleo, Becky and Laura, Grendel’s three top Gals.  Laura hissed, drawing a frown from the Shade.  She nearly passed out in fear.  Enkidu shook his head at the antics of Grendel’s undisciplined Gals.  “Very interesting, but I’m not sure what use those things are.”

“Well, at worst they’re light élan snacks on the hoof,” Enkidu said.

“Massster, there’sss other usesss for them asss well,” Grendel said.  “It’s Cleo’sss idea.  If we can get enough of them, they’d make a good dissssss…”  Grendel snapped at the air.  The fool had lost another word.

These days, Enkidu suspected Cleo had become smarter than Grendel himself.

Wandering Shade walked over and prodded Cleo with his foot.  “So, do you remember the word Grendel lost?”

Cleo curled up and hid her face from Wandering Shade.  Wandering Shade had all the Gals terrified, especially Grendel’s talking Gals.  “Distraction,” she said, her voice easier to understand than Grendel’s.

Enkidu still wanted a Gal who could talk.  The Shade thought of the Gals as nothing more than the Hunters’ juice supply, but he was wrong.  They represented power, unharnessed power.  He worked hard perfecting draws from the Gals and bringing their minds back, but he needed more experience.  He was just too young a Hunter.

“I want to hear more about this.”  He turned to Enkidu.  “From someone who can talk.”

Enkidu finished off the last hunk of raw pork in his hand in one gulp.  “Master.  We’ve learned we might have a problem with the Focuses.  Even those two idiot Crows knew about Grendel’s encounter with the Focus, which means there’s some sort of convoluted communication path between the Focuses, Crows and Arms.  They’re not as ignorant of each other as we thought
, and I’m betting the Focuses
hired
the Arms to go after us.  More importantly, the Crows know the head bitch Focus in the area, who they named Hera, supplies surplus clinic Transforms for the older Arm.  Which means the bitch has herself a pet Arm.  If we attack the Arms, we’re likely to end up with a bunch of damned Focus bitches and their Transform armies on our asses as well.  Sir.”

Wandering Shade spat.
“What does this have to do with those psychos?”

“Cleo figured out the Zombies
– that’s my name for a psycho we’ve stabilized – follow the scent of juice.”  It had taken a lot of work, but Enkidu had managed to somewhat befriend Cleo.  She was the only one around here the least bit interesting to talk with.  “If we release them downwind of the Focuses, they’ll march toward them, even though their minds are gone.”

“Zombies!”  Wandering Shade laughed, screwed his eyes up so that only the whites were showing, and shuffled slowly across the room.  Enkidu nodded and laughed as well.  “There’s a problem, though.  I count only two of your juice zombies.  You’ll need more than two to distract one of the pathetic Focuses
, and Hera is anything but pathetic.”

“Master, I’m afraid we’re going to have to do some more hunting,” Enkidu said, and licked his lips.

“I understand how much any extra hunting will pain you,” Wandering Shade said.  Grendel chuffed laughter.  Grendel loved to hunt, even when he didn’t have to.  “That will push the schedule back, and force me to be involved as well, to release these Zombies of yours.”

“It’s unavoidable.”

“Who’ll guard the Gals, then?” their Master asked.

Enkidu took a deep breath.  “Let them guard themselves for once.”  Let Cleo prove herself, he didn’t say.

Wandering Shade nodded and turned his back on Enkidu.  “Let’s do this.”

I paced Bobby’s Baltimore apartment, jittery from higher than optimal juice, and thought about my day.  I had worn him out twice, but he would recover soon.  I felt his hot gaze on me from the bed, where he should be resting and sleeping, as the clock read 12:17.  The place stank of sweat, sex and bad takeout Chinese.  I was both annoyed and pleased with myself.  Annoyed because I
had gotten my Baltimore test kill only twenty-two minutes from where I captured him before he became
mine
; my goal had been an hour.  Pleased because my plastic sheeting idea had worked to block the juice smell.  I learned, alas, I also had a problem with my metasense.  Progress, albeit minimal.  However, as I had said to Zielinski, if my graduation test was easy it wouldn’t be worth doing.

The second I f
ell asleep I had the pinball nightmare again.  Only this time I remembered to look at the scoreboard of the pinball game, and amid the blinking lights and whirring numbers I made out the figure of an androgynous clown, an evil androgynous clown whose eyes followed my every move.  The clown eyes awakened me
quickly
.  I didn’t know what to think about the crazy dream.

“Do you know what I am, Bobby?” I said.

He practically died of a heart attack on the spot.  “Huh?  What do you mean?” Bobby said.  Liar.

“Relax,” I said.  “So you’ve figured out I’m an Arm.  I’m not going to kill you just for that.  I’ll get you for your other failings…”

I smiled at him, and the threat and the smile gave him an instant erection.  Bobby was fun in bed, an intriguing mix of macho and sensitivity.  Turned on by danger, too.

He was mine.

“I’m a predator,” I said.  “What’s my prey?”

“Humans?” he said.  Dangerous conversation.  He liked the talk, and I liked his fear.

“Unwanted Transforms,” I said.  “They’re going to die, anyway.  But how do normal humans treat their prey?”

“Huh?  We don’t have prey, do we?”

“Then where does meat come from?  Don’t say supermarkets, either.”  Glare.

My glare earned me an extra frisson of fear.  “Okay.  Farms, I guess,” he said.  “Slaughterhouses.”

I hadn’t given much thought, before, about how humans treated their own prey.  My previous ruminations had been on hunting, but reading a hundred issues of Field and Stream hadn’t given me a single useful idea.  Hunting was sport, not the method producing our nation’s majority of meat.  Meat came from cows and chickens and pigs.

I remembered Uncle Herbie’s farm.

I grew up in Missouri, and I was under no illusions about where meat came from.  Farmers treated dairy cattle well.  Small family farms often were gentle with all their animals.  On the other hand, large-scale industrial farming businesses produced as much meat as possible, for as little cost as possible.  Efficiency was the driving motive, not kindness to the animals.

“If farm animals were human, the way they’re treated by the big factory farms would be considered inhuman,” I said.

“They’re just animals, Kate,” Bobby said.

“Well, then, since humans are my prey, humanity has no grounds to object to the way I treat my own prey.”

“Humans aren’t mindless animals,” he said.  I glared at him.  “Alright, most humans aren’t…”

I giggled and did the predator thing at Bobby, enough so that he scrabbled back away from me in the bed.  “I like doing this,” I said.  “I like to hurt people.”  Bobby nodded.  He understood from experience.

“People who work in slaughterhouses, they’re just doing a job,” Bobby said.

“Exactly.”  My delight in cruelty nagged at me.  I enjoyed being cruel.  I enjoyed being cruel so much it was part of my sex life.  Cruelty aroused me.  I brought those urges into bed with me.  “How much should I enjoy being a predator?”

“Guys enjoy sex but that doesn’t mean they go rape the nearest woman whenever they get horny.”

“So I should repress those urges?  Completely?”  I said.  I turned icy and distant
, and Bobby’s manhood became limp.  “Should I become the Arm equivalent of a celibate priest?”

“Well,” he said.  “There’s always the idea that people should enjoy their jobs.”

I almost laughed, but didn’t.  “I enjoy cruelty.  I enjoy hurting people.  I love the feel of power,” I said.  I loved the terror, the helplessness in my prey’s eyes, the destruction of their minds, their will.  I leapt to the bed and stalked Bobby, scaring him half to death.  I pinned him, and with him helpless underneath me, I teased him ready.

“But,” I said, “my attitude leaves a lot of corpses behind.”  I remembered my hallucination of St. Peter.  Those puffy cotton clouds would be a lot firmer under my feet if
I only killed my true prey.

“I’d rather not be a corpse,” he whispered.

“No one would.”  I let the older lust take over and made Bobby moan.  Soon we went on to other diversions.

I had an emotional problem with the cruelty and extraneous killing.  Not guilt, but something else.  I suspected I endangered myself by the way I hunted.  Endangering my soul, to put it in the language of the St. Peter hallucination.

I walked a fine line.  If I tried to deny my nature as a predator, I would destroy myself, because being a predator was central to my existence.  On the other hand, if I fully gave in to my predatory lust, I would become a mindless beast.  So, where was the damned boundary?  How much of my brutal cruelty was necessary?  When did my urges become too much?

Keaton was my only example.  I remembered the squat rack with a wince.  That episode had been a hell of a lesson in
too much
.  Right now, I was nothing but a distant mirror of Keaton, a beast following in her sadistic footsteps.  She wanted me to be crazy so she could tell herself she was sane.  For the moment, I was stuck.

I would never find the true path for an Arm while I remained under Keaton’s thumb.

Gilgamesh huddled against Tolstoy under the steel stairway, as far away from the action as the chains allowed.  At the foot of the stair, at the other end of the chains, Enkidu humped Jodie.  Jodie wasn’t even a Transform.

She made little whimpering noises with each thrust, her dyed blonde hair bobbing on the cement floor.  Her pathetic whimpers were the only sound she had made since she made the mistake of fighting back.  A puddle of blood grew beneath her hips.  Gilgamesh didn’t expect her to survive much longer.

Something in the two Beast Men’s plan must have fallen apart after Wire’s death.  Since the day Grendel slaughtered Wire both Beast Men hadn’t been here at the same time.  Out hunting, they said, but they came back wet and unhappy each time.  Neither he nor Tolstoy were able to figure out what had happened to Wire’s dross.  While Gilgamesh had been unconscious and after the two Beasts had grilled Tolstoy on the Arms until he passed out in terror, the dross had vanished.  Both he and Tolstoy remained low on juice, so low they shivered.

Enkidu approached his climax, grunting and thrusting hard.  Gilgamesh heard Jodie’s heartbeat weaken and stop, a relief.  At least Enkidu couldn’t do anything more to her.  Enkidu didn’t care.  He kept humping until he climaxed, about a minute later.

“Damn,” Enkidu said, after he finished.  “What a waste.  These normal women aren’t worth shit in bed.”  There weren’t any beds in this hellhole.  Enkidu’s actions were always overblown and nothing, save perhaps his hallucination of a Master and the Master’s Law, could tell Enkidu ‘too much’.

The ‘Master’ scared Gilgamesh, because he didn’t exist.  The Beasts talked to him as if he was physically present, they responded as if he was present in the room, but nobody was present,
only a shared delusion they let give them orders.  They had no rational control over what they did or didn’t do, because their ‘Master’ was a fantasy created by their own insanity.

Enkidu’s actions shattered everything Gilgamesh and Tolstoy knew about Beast Men.  He was smart, his vocabulary almost Crow-like.  He understood more about Transform Sickness than either Crow.  Like the Crows, Enkidu covered up the gaps in his knowledge using made up terms, words and explanations.  Enkidu created intricate plans, carried them out
, and improvised and changed his plans when problems arose.  Also like a Crow, Enkidu’s morality had drifted far from normal human.  Very far.

None of the Philadelphia Crows had realized a Beast Man could be anywhere near this dangerous.  Beast Men were supposed to be dumb and hungry, dammit!  A dangerous joke.  Crows were supposed to be their
masters
!

Someone should have told Enkidu.  He hadn’t gotten the message.  His only
master was madness.

Enkidu glanced over at Jodie’s body and sighed.  He appeared much the same as the day he captured Gilgamesh.

“The hunting’s been good, but my Master’s had us hunting male Transforms and they’re no fun at all,” Enkidu said.  The Beast Man metasensed as bloated with élan, but the two Beast Men blew through juice as if it was soda pop.  Much worse than even the Arms, which gave him the idea that the two Beasts didn’t understand even the beginnings of how to be proper Transforms.  Enkidu was too young and too inexperienced.  “This whole thing’s been one fuck-up after another.  We should have attacked the damned Arm bitches the first night, as soon as the old bitch fell asleep.  More of a risk, but better than all this goddamned pussyfooting around trying to be cute.  Damn, I wish we were done with this damned hunting.  I want this to be over, so I can rip those goddamned Arm bitches
to shreds
!”