Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (46 page)

The metasense scan wasn’t a smart idea, given her meager juice supply.  Consciousness fled.

In her memory vision, she finished cutting out her heart.  It lay in her hands, warm and sticky, still slowly beating.  The burnt stench of ozone filled the air.  With a half bow, the best possible given her captivity, she presented her heart to Focus Schrum.  Tonya had mastered her pain before she started in on the heart, while she cut in to find it.  She hadn’t realized she would be able to master the pain so easily, or master the insane terror over what she did to herself.

Looking back on the moment, Tonya wondered if she had been a bit more ambitious than was wise when she cut her own heart out.  A mite stupid as well.  The other first Focuses, save for Focus Patterson, expected her to fail.  They frowned, hiding anger, when she presented Suzie her heart
, except for Focus Patterson, who smiled with gladness.  On the other hand, Tonya had sensed the Focuses in attendance didn’t expect her to die, and she hadn’t.  Perhaps this expectation was what gave her the confidence to fight her bone-crushing terror and cut.

From the vantage point of three years later, her choice looked arrogant and stupid.

The smell of scented soap filled Tonya’s mind, without warning.  Scented soap wasn’t a part of her memory.

“You failed to bring the disparate Transforms together, Tonya,” Suzie Schrum said, disdainful.  “I’d been counting on you.”

Those words were certainly not part of her memory.  What happened to Suzie eating crow and accepting Tonya’s membership on the Council?  Whose voice lay behind Suzie’s words?

“You know who I am, though as always you’ll repress the knowledge because you’re afraid,” the false memory voice of Schrum said.  “None of today’s horror would have happened if you
had found a way to work with the other Major Transforms involved.  I’ve told you repeatedly.”

“I know,” Tonya spat.  Even if the voice came from
the person she suspected, the voice had taken on Suzie’s foul personality, which angered Tonya.  “The Council formally decreed the Crows and Chimeras do not exist; because of their decision I must tread cautiously.  I can’t work with the Crows, and the Arms turned uncooperative after they failed to chase the Chimera pack away.”  She was tired of everyone being on her case.  Even Schrum, or whoever wore Schrum’s face in her messed up memory, was on her case about inter-Transform cooperation.  Suzie normally said Focuses should shoot Crows on sight.

“You leave me no choice but to interfere,” the false memory voice of Schrum said.  “I’ll be kind, though, and only send my number two catalyst.  More tests are coming.”  The message made no sense to Tonya at all.

“You always interfere, Suzie,” Tonya said.

The false memory Schrum sighed.  “Go huddle with your Attendants, Tonya.  More trouble is on the way.”

“Can I have my heart back?” Tonya asked, plaintive.  It was all she really wanted in life.

Slap!

“Wake the fuck up, you piece…”

Gilgamesh woke up from his dream.  He had been in a woman’s arms, the woman rocking him and singing to him such kind songs, as if he was the most important person in the world.  From comfort to this?

He sicked up on his slap-happy attacker, panicked, terrified.  He would ask his questions later.

“Holy fucking crap, what the shit did you do to me?”

The Skinner’s voice.  Instant panic.  He had sicked-up on an Arm!  He was dead!

Gilgamesh, still blindfolded and tied to the chair, had to rely on his metasense.  “Madam Arm, you startled me,” Gilgamesh tried to say around his gag.  His words came out as a stammered panicky “mmph mmph mmmmmhf mmph”.  He metasensed around in hurried terror and found the Skinner, across the room and just out of
sick-up range.  She aimed her high-powered rifle at him.

He wasn’t a Beast Man.  One hit from one of those bullets and it would be feathers everywhere!

No.  No!  I’m just called a Crow, Gilgamesh thought.  I’m not
physically
a Crow.

Hell.  He was beyond panic again, a state he had become far too familiar with recently.

“Fix this or you’re dead, Crow,” the Skinner said.  Gilgamesh barely understood her mumble.  His sick-up had harmed the Arm.  He didn’t expect that, after the minimal effect of his sick-ups on the Beast Men.

More panic.  She knew he was a Crow!

Without any thought, Gilgamesh started to draw his sick-up off the Arm.  He did so for a minute, before he began to think around the panic.  What was he doing?

“Help me, madam Arm,” he said through the gag, after stopping his
clean up.  “I’ll help you if you help me.”

He focused his metasense on the Skinner.  She leaned against
the metal staircase, her unwounded leg twitching, her left hand opening and closing uncontrollably, her face swollen up.  He doubted she would be able to stand.

“You’ll fix me if I free you?” the Skinner said.  With her face swollen, her words came out as ‘uhhhl fish ee’ to start with.  Gilgamesh giggled, but he caught himself.  Giggling was an inappropriate reaction.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, through the gag, as calmly as possible.  Dark humor ran through his mind: if Enkidu returned, they would give him little more trouble than one of those stray dogs the two Beast Men considered delicacies.

“Fuck.”  Thwap!  A knife hit Gilgamesh’s chair.  He
almost fainted.  The knife hadn’t hit him, though.  In a moment, he recovered what little equilibrium he had left, and realized the Arm had positioned the knife perfectly, to let him slice through the ropes binding his hands.

“Skittish, aren’t you?”

Gilgamesh nodded as he freed his hands, removed his gag and tossed the blindfold.

“Superhuman manual dexterity,” the Skinner said.

For the first time in his life, Gilgamesh saw the Skinner.

He quailed.  Without the slightest hesitation, he resumed his sick-up cleaning, as fast as he could.

The Skinner’s hair was short and Marine cut, and her face didn’t have an inch of femininity to it, terrifying and masculine.  Dour.  Ugly.  Her upper lip had a permanent sneer built into it.  Bruises covered her, as did spatters of blood and far too many wounds, some of which still gaped open.  Her eyes held death and her body…an anatomy diagram, her musculature unbelievably massive.  You obeyed her, or you died.

He understood, now, why Tiamat licked this one’s feet.

The Skinner slid down with her back against the wall and sat on the floor as he worked.  Gilgamesh doubted she could sense dross, but she still knew he removed the sick-up.  “You think I’m ugly, you ought to take a gander at yourself,” she said, a few moments later.  “You look like something the fucking cat puked up just before it died.  Speaking of which, who’s the fucking corpse and why’d he die?”

“It was another Crow,” Gilgamesh said.  “The Beast Men killed him for his juice just before they attacked you.”

“You hate them.  I like that.  Can’t you do this any faster?” the Skinner said. The Skinner’s gums seeped blood.  “Your captor is getting away, dammit!”

“Madam Arm, I
am
working as fast as I can,” Gilgamesh said, a bit more huffy than was likely wise.  “I’m sorry about the attack.  I was unconscious, you startled me and I hit you with a little something I had prepared for my captors.”

“Huh.”  She looked him over.  “It worked better on me tha
n you expected it would work on the werewolf.  You expected he was going to kill you for your juice.”

He nodded and shivered.  She read his mind!  Blackness crept into the edges of his vision again.  No!  He couldn’t afford to pass out.  Not just from talking to an Arm.

She would capture him, enslave him, and do to him what she had done to Tiamat!  His panic gripped him hard.

He was better than the panic.  He had to be. 
The Skinner had been reasonable so far.  Compared to Enkidu and Grendel, she was a fucking saint!

He drew the dross from her for a few more minutes.  She waited, impatient but in full control of herself.  After his weeks as a Beast Man captive, he found the Arm’s self-control refreshing.  With a little time, he realized he appreciated her attitude.  He respected her.

He liked Arms, he realized.  They were nothing like the barbarous over-excited addled and stupid Beast Men.

“You need to come closer,” Gilgamesh said.  “Otherwise I can’t finish the
cleanup.”

“Fuck that,” the Skinner said, and smiled at him
, showing bleeding gums and red teeth.  She stood and picked up her hunting rifle.  Her wounds had closed from her Beast-Man fight, but her skin still wore a flush from his sick-up.

“Hold onto that pose,” the Skinner said as she fiddled with her weapon, something obscure that involved bullets.  “We’ve got some talking to do.  Stay here.  You can finish the
cleanup job when I get back.”  She smiled a gruesome smile.  “I’ll make it worth your while.  I can guarantee that.”

He froze as the Skinner walked off.  Dammit!  Covered in the remnants of his sick-up, she needed to spend hours here and allow him to finish the job.  She still might
die
from his sick-up.

On the other hand
, the police still cruised in the neighborhood and Hera’s Transform minions now searched the Skinner’s lair.  He doubted he would emerge at all sane if he spent much more time with the overly forceful and semi-divine Arm in any case.  Besides…

Fractured memories of his captivity flooded his mind, the worst being the taking of the tainted dross from Tolstoy’s death.  Gilgamesh blacked out.

Tonya’s Transform women continued rubbing up against her, comforting themselves and each other.  The rest of the household remained on edge from the fight with the psychos and their discovery of Keaton’s lair and its contents.  Tonya’s mind wandered, working out the consequences of her crowd dispersal.  Which of her enemies would notice?  What would they do?  What, pray tell, would her friends do when they heard about her new trick?  Her reputation already suffered from her earlier ‘un-Focus-like’ activities.

Tonya had experienced th
e rubbing behavior from her household Transform women only twice before in her ten plus years as a Focus.  None of the Focuses had a real name for it, just orders from above never to mention it to the media or to the doctors.  Focus Rizzari called it the juice grope and her gibberish explanation was pure Lori-land.

Whatever her opinions of Rizzari’s explanation, Tonya still made sure she was near a telephone.  Bad news often came over the phone.  She closed her eyes and let the magic of the juice grope (if only Lori would come up with better names!) do its job and help Tonya recover her personal juice.

When the front doorbell rang, she didn’t even bother to examine the area with her metasense until after the shouting started.  She wanted no more excitement today, and the juice grope was distracting, languorous, sensual and almost maddeningly like sexual foreplay.  Her women?  They were orgasmic.

Tonya leapt to her feet and ran out the door before her conscious mind registered the metasense signature.  There was an Arm in her house!

“Where’s Tonya, dammit, you stupid fucking idiots!” Keaton said, loud and commanding.  Tonya flew down the stairs in a run, turned left, and almost slipped on the throw rug on the old but perfectly maintained hardwood floor in the hall between the bottom of the stairs and the front door.

The juice grope had done its job.  She wasn’t about to pass out any more, her juice level low, not disastrous.  “Here!” Tonya said, now adrenaline awake.  “Everyone else back off.”  The men on bodyguard duty carried Monster guns,
well-armed today, but even their heavy weaponry was useless against an Arm.  There were too few of them.

Her bodyguards circled the Arm, shaken, wary, and unsure what to say or do.  Tonya
’s appearance, naked, robe in hand, didn’t help their composure.  She put on the robe.

Keaton, splayed out on the floor, lay part way through the door.  She looked like as much a wreck as Tonya had ever seen her: hair falling off her head, a broken leg, perhaps a broken arm, missing teeth, deep cuts, skin turning scaly in places, furry in others.  The Arm’s metapresence was that of one of the half-Monster women who served the Chimera.  Tonya stopped cold and wordlessly gaped like an idiot, able to do little else besides wave her people away.

“Is it safe for me to help you?” Tonya asked.  Did an Arm in this condition have enough control not to be stupid?

“Finally,” Keaton said.  She looked up at Tonya with bleary eyes, and shook her head.  “I need juice.  Lots of juice.  I’m leaking this shit juice I have in me wherever I go.  I can’t do anything with it.”

“You’re blocking open the front door,” Tonya said.  The whole world would be able to spy out the wanted criminal draped across her entryway, including some Monsters Die protesters, hopefully too stupid to understand.  Standing Council orders left Tonya with no choice but to keep Keaton alive and functional, even if the orders meant literally inviting the Arm into her household and protecting her.