Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (45 page)

“How about if I offered you Keaton’s head on a platter?”

“You don’t have it and you won’t get it,” I said.  Megalomania.  Did this idiot think I graduated just to plan my revenge on her?  Keaton saved my miserable life.  I wanted her as a peer.  I no more wanted her to be a corpse than I wanted her to be my slave
master.

My captor’s comment gave me insight into the way she thought.  Officer Canon wasn’t only evil by choice, but one of those people consumed with hatred and her own self-importance.  If Officer Canon escaped someone who owned her in the same way Keaton recently owned me, she would have put her entire effort into killing him or her.

“You’d be surprised.  I need an Arm,” Officer Canon said, back to the subject of employment.  “I’ll destroy you if I have to, but I would rather recruit you.”

I refused to let either happen.  I still had the flensing knife in a sheath along the inside of my left arm, and I knew how to use it.  This damned evil Focus was through messing with my mind!

I grabbed the flensing knife with my right hand and plunged it deep into the index finger of my left hand, scraping bone.  The pain, real and horrific, brought spots to my eyes.

I let the pain feed my concentration, and I concentrated on my metasense.

The world around me vanished.  No back seat, no police car.  I found myself in some sort of truck, the rear door still open, assaulted by the stench of Monsters and bad juice.  To my metasense, Officer Cannon became indistinct, not quite there, some sort of large fog bank.  I hadn’t penetrated all of her illusions.

She
was fiddling with a lock, attempting to put a heavy chain and shackle around my right ankle.  Close.  I yanked free of the shackle and kicked at her.  Hit.  Hard.  She flew back across the truck, but as she did so, she waved her right hand at me.  I skidded back as fast as my feet could scramble, but the edge of something unseen hit me as Officer Cannon thudded into the front wall of the truck with the meaty crack of at least one bone breaking.  Cannon’s attack sickened me, as if she had turned me inside out and dropped a full load of Monster juice into my body.  I puked and my metasense failed.

I puked again and backpedaled as fast as possible, given the circumstances.  I only half-stumbled once, and when I reached the back of the truck, I drew my .45 and looked for Cannon.  Nothing.  Sirens blared in the distance.  A
passerby took one look at my bleeding hand and screamed.

Damn.  Too public.

“No!  I mean you no harm.  I just want to…” Officer Canon said.  She took a couple of steps forward, visible again, but stopped when her eyes found my pistol.

I doubted she was where she appeared to be.

I leapt back, out of the truck.  Canon took a step forward.  I took another step back.  Canon smiled.

I marked Canon as a Focus; her abilities matched Keaton and Zielinski’s commentary about the tricks of the top Focuses.  My head spun from her mind games.  Still, my gut feeling was that if I stayed far enough away from her, Canon couldn’t harm me.

“I’m not interested in what you have to say.  Go away,” I said.

Officer Canon vanished from my sight, complete with the Cheshire Cat smile-vanishes-last routine, the arrogant bitch.  I hadn’t taken my eyes off of her.  The
passersby screamed again.  Hell!  They too saw Officer Canon vanish.

No one could vanish from sight in broad daylight!

I’ll admit, I was backsliding badly toward a belief in the supernatural.  Keaton and Zielinski had convinced me everything about Transforms was purely natural, but Officer Canon’s actions provided a strong refutation.  I took another two steps back.

“You’re dead, Hancock, you unreasonable bitch!  You’re as dead as Keaton.  As dead as any Arm.  A plague on all Arms!”  Officer Canon said, from somewhere invisible and close.  Several
passersby heard Canon’s curse and started running.  I was in deep trouble.  Real deep trouble.  Any moment now, Officer Canon would pluck out a firearm and shoot me from her invisibility, or hit me dead on with her make-you-puke weapon.

Oh.

Shiiit.

Officer Canon was the evil clown from my nightmares, following me from behind mask after mask after…

I panicked in utter terror, deeper than Keaton’s worst.

Instinctively, I focused my metasense on where Officer Canon had to be, at the back edge of her truck.  Lo and behold, I metasensed her
as an indistinct presence, a monstrous fogbank three times human size.

Flushed, my skin all warm, my eyes opened wide with shock.  I
had burned juice!  Driven by panic, I had burned juice into my metasense.

I had to control it.  Otherwise, I would burn myself out, just as Fouke did.

Another wolf howled in the distance.  This time the howl raised hackles on the back of my neck.  There was juice in that howl!  A Chimera!

I backpedaled as fast as possible, burning juice, firing in Officer Canon’s general direction to distract her.  I didn’t care whether I hit her or not.  It was time to run.  I didn’t want her to get close to me again.  I certainly didn’t want to fight a Chimera and Officer Canon at the same time.

Luckily, whatever was wrong with Officer Canon’s sanity affected her grasp of combat tactics.  Even I wouldn’t have made as many mistakes as Officer Canon, given all her advantages.  I pegged her as some sort of ancient powerful Focus, and someone with her experience should have about a dozen ways to kill or disable me, especially if she combined firearms with the invisibility trick.  I refused to give her enough time to figure out how to fight.

I ran.

I managed to shut off the juice burning trick a half mile into my run, but I didn’t stop running until I nicked a car on the other side of Philly almost two hours later.  I swear I must have skipped in joy a quarter of the way to that car.  I was free!  Out of Keaton’s darkness and into the light!  I had escaped from Officer Canon, proving myself ready to face the world on my own!

I had
also figured out how to burn juice.

Heh.

“Dammit!” Gilgamesh said, a mumble through his gag.  He tried again to walk his chair across the floor, and again got nowhere.  Still blindfolded, he couldn’t see what impeded him, even with the ocean of foul dross outlining everything with vivid metasense light.

Enkidu strode back toward the warehouse, defeated, but very much still alive.

Gilgamesh panicked at the thought of Enkidu’s return, his stomach threatening to come up on him.  The stench of Tolstoy’s corpse in the close hot warehouse didn’t help.  Even Grendel hadn’t died, despite his massive wounds.

The Skinner took a few precious moments to deal with Grendel.  First, she tried to take juice from him.  She gave up on that after a few seconds.  After she hopped around her warehouse for a few
more seconds, steaming in anger, she returned to Grendel and beheaded him, presumably with a larger knife or sword.  Beheading seemed to do the trick, although to Gilgamesh’s disgust quite a bit of tenacious life remained in the Beast Man.  His life force faded, though.  He wouldn’t recover on his own.  After the beheading, the Skinner picked up some more heavy weaponry and left her lair to follow Enkidu.

Enkidu had enough of a lead to safely kill or kidnap Gilgamesh
long before the Skinner arrived.

Wounds slowed both of the predators,
and neither moved faster than a normal walk.  Enkidu carried more wounds and much worse wounds, but there was so much more of him
to
wound.  Both of them acted jumpy, likely due to the police action just to the south near where the Focus had been attacked by the male Transforms in withdrawal.  With Enkidu’s greater metasense range, he probably also worried about whatever Tiamat had encountered.  She ran, now, after fighting an indistinct Major Transform Gilgamesh couldn’t even identify as to type.

Enkidu
would arrive here in a minute, unless the Skinner finished Enkidu off with her new weapons.  She took several long-range shots at him, but he didn’t fall.  One police car siren approached, but the car rolled in slowly using an ultra-cautious Monster-hunting technique.  Gilgamesh suspected the male withdrawal victims, the exhausted Focus and Enkidu’s wolf howls had the police spooked.

Gilgamesh took a deep breath and calmed himself as best he could.  He carried enough dross now for a good sick-up, which he hoped would work.  Unfortunately, sick ups hadn’t worked on Enkidu, before.

Enkidu, however, proved to have other ideas.  When he reached the warehouse, he stepped in only long enough to grab a large pack before heading off, about three seconds worth of work.  A costly three seconds, as the Skinner shot at him again with her high-powered rifle as he exited the warehouse.  This time she hit Enkidu in the back.

Enkidu reached into his pack, took out a quart of milk and chugged it.  After dropping the empty quart of milk he gave the Skinner the middle finger salute and began to
jog
off.  For a moment, Gilgamesh couldn’t figure out how.  Then he got it: the quart of milk, the minutes of post-fight recovery time, and the Beast-Man ability to change shape.  Healing of battle wounds must be just another use of their shape-changing trick.  Enkidu didn’t double back on the Skinner and press his attack, though.  Despite his healing, he remained wounded, and less aggressive than the Arm.

For a moment, wild hope filled Gilgamesh.  Enkidu ran!  The Skinner followed!  The police approached, and he would trade a police interrogation for being predator bait in an instant.

Unfortunately, the Skinner proved Gilgamesh as wrong as he had been about Enkidu.  She stopped at the entrance to the warehouse, sniffed, and came inside.

“What the fuck happened here?” she said, her glow an angry solar yellow, her voice as terror-inducing as one of Enkidu’s roars.  “Well fuck me sideways with a backhoe.  The motherfucking asshole Chimeras had a goddamned cuntlicking
lair
in my cocksucking
backyard
!”

Gilgamesh passed out.

“You think you’re such a hero, bitch!  You’ve driven yourself right to the edge of death and withdrawal many times to protect your people,” Suzie said.  Her voice echoed through Tonya’s memories.  “So what?  You’re a nothing.”

Tonya also heard Ronda and Marty patiently explaining to the police officers the series of events.  They hadn’t harmed a hair on the heads of the protesters
, despite the fact the protesters wounded four of them, one, Danny, badly enough to need stitches.  No, they couldn’t say where the psycho withdrawal victims had come from.  No, they couldn’t say who or what had roared.  Yes, the unknown might be a Monster.

She didn’t see them.  Darkness surrounded her.

Focus Susan Schrum was Tonya’s boss and chief tormentor.  “We all understand where the true loyalty of any hero lies: to herself and the people she protects.  Not to us.  I don’t trust you, bitch.”  Suzie said.  “None of us trusts you.”

In her memories, the scene came alive as it had been, over three years ago.  The ruling first Focuses had her torso and legs
tied to a pillar in the rented hall, away from the other attendees, a large sheet of plastic under her feet.  Tonya had been terrified, her imagination filled with hundreds of horrific possibilities for what the Focuses might do.

Suzie handed Tonya a knife.
“Take the knife,” Schrum ordered.  She did.  “Prove you’ll obey us in all things.  Cut out your heart.”

…if you want to be on the Council.  Wini Adkins’ eyes grew hungry…and Wini was Tonya’s closest friend and ally.  The eyes of the other first Focuses, standing in a ring around her, held worse.  Animals.  Nothing but
animals
.

Tonya screamed and woke up, memory dream gone.  She was in a car, her own car, her head on Rhonda’s lap.  Pete had her blouse cut open, needle in one hand and a spool of fishing line in his mouth.  She had a nasty cut on her shoulder.  She didn’t notice the pain, didn’t remember the blow.

“We talked our way out of the clutches of the police, but Marty says his team’s found Keaton’s lair and needs to know what to do,” Rhonda said.  “They found evidence of a huge fight, blood, an Arm-drained Transform and a Monster corpse, but no Keaton.”

“Get a patrol team over to the warehouse and strip the place,” Tonya said.  The police would be able to find the place as eas
ily as her people did.  She would hold the contents for Keaton to retrieve later.  The Monster must have fought the Arms, a bad fight if they left a Transform corpse behind.  The Transform?  Tonya put it together in her head.  The Arm Gerry spotted must have been Hancock and the Transform Keaton’s graduation requirement.

Thinking was nearly too much for Tonya.  Her head ached, the light
was too bright, and she tasted vomit in her throat.  She would still be asleep, save for her bad dream.  She still needed to be asleep.

Tonya pushed herself to stay awake.  Her mind remained in battle mode, and in battle mode, she had trained herself to do a metasense scan once a minute.  “Wait.  Several patrol teams but no Transforms.  No Trans…”