Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (6 page)

The usual.  Keaton was a slob and couldn’t cook to save her life.  Thus the raw hamburger.

After turning away, she poked her head around her thick shoulder.  “Oh, and if you ever use your predator effect on me without my permission, I’ll take it as a challenge and I won’t hold back
at all
.”

“Ma’am.”  I bowed in understanding.

I would fight anyone who went predator on me, too.  Except Keaton.

I hoped I didn’t slip up someday.

At night, after Keaton had gone to bed and left me to catch the couple of hours of sleep I needed each night, I thought about what I
had done, coming back to Keaton from California, and pushing her to give me a graduation requirement.  I sat with my back against the stacked boxes in the storeroom where I slept, and stared at the flimsy wooden partition opposite.  Now with the danger passed, the possible consequences of my actions threatened to give me nightmares.  Pain, torture, even death if I guessed wrong about Keaton’s reactions.  After four months of Keaton’s hell, I had become intimately familiar with the stuff of nightmares.  The shivering started and cold sweat beaded on my sides.  Ice cold memories of previous abuse clawed their way from the depths of my memories and played themselves out for me afresh.

I put my head on my knees and waited it out.  The reaction would pass, eventually, I knew from experience.

The shivering stopped after 15 minutes or so and I cautiously let my muscles relax.  I had taken a big chance today, and the cost of failure was steep, but I hadn’t failed.  I had done exactly what I set out to do, kept myself together in front of Keaton, and come out with a graduation test.

A goal.  Hope.  A way to leave Hell.

Returning from California and facing Keaton had taken all my courage and ingenuity.

I suspec
ted today’s confrontation was the least of what would be required in order to walk out of Keaton’s grasp intact.

When Tiamat returned
a few minutes after midnight, Gilgamesh froze among the trash of the old junkyard he had been searching when he first metasensed her, astonished and unnerved.  Her brilliance, the dense concentration of so much danger in so small a space, made Gilgamesh shiver.  He wondered if Sinclair and Orange Sunshine were right when they said Gilgamesh was too young for this.

“Deal with it,” he muttered to himself.  “I haven’t searched all those months just to give up now.”  He crouched in the shadows of
a couple of broken refrigerators and metasensed Tiamat, relearning the terrible fury and passion contained within her.  He expected her to do something terrible to live up to her name and nature.

Instead, she and Zaltu fought…and Tiamat lost.  Badly. 
Even with Tiamat nearly at her juice optimum, perhaps two to three days post-kill, while Zaltu was low and likely therefore slow.  Despite Tiamat’s poor performance in the fight, Gilgamesh decided she had become much more muscular since her time in St. Louis.

Tiamat stayed her knees on the floor in front of Zaltu, a full-out grovel, after the fight’s conclusion.  Gilgamesh’s jaw dropped in astonishment over his Tiamat’s behavior.  She cringed and cowered, more like a whipped dog than a human being.  He winced in sympathy over his goddess of destruction’s degradation.

He metasensed Ezekiel and Tolstoy approaching the warehouse, and Gilgamesh followed.  The Crows stopped and scattered a little less than a half mile away from the warehouse, careful to stay downwind.  They waited while Zaltu tortured Tiamat, and the dross started to flow.  Only a little bit at first, a thin fog that slowly leaked from Tiamat, almost invisible amid the background patina that covered the warehouse.  Gilgamesh stared, appalled.

Around him, Ezekiel and Tolstoy reached out and took small sips of the hot un-aged dross.  The dross stayed in narrow channels, the same way the dross behaved outside the St. Louis Detention Center, presumably from many previous Crow feedings.  Gilgamesh soon joined in their feeding.

Several minutes later Zaltu stopped her torture, backed off and started to talk to Tiamat while Tiamat continued to cower on the floor.

Gilgamesh clenched his fists so tight his fingernails carved deep red crescents into his palms.  What had happened to his goddess?  He hadn’t searched for
this
.  Someone as strong and terrible as his goddess of destruction shouldn’t be so humbled.  This was an offense to the universe.  She should be wild and free and terrible, not some cringing animal whipped into submission.  The wrongness of it twisted inside of him.

Tiamat, his goddess of destruction, had fallen to a greater goddess.

“Be reasonable,” he whispered to himself as he huddled in the shadows.  “Be rational.  She isn’t a goddess of destruction.  She’s just an ordinary woman suffering from Transform Sickness.  Nothing special.”

She couldn’t even carry her own dreams, much less his.  Her mistress was no goddess either, just a cold cruel woman.  Neither deserved the names he gave them.  Dogs might do something like this.  It wouldn’t bother him if they were dogs.

Or would it?  Well, not if they were wild dogs.

He waited, unable to tear away his metasense.  Tiamat eventually stood, and after a short conversation Zaltu led Tiamat to a back room clogged with foul gristle dross.  He noticed for the first time that Zaltu held a normal man captive in the back room, faintly outlined in gristle dross.  Tiamat approached the man…and the man fell over, dead.  Tiamat had killed him with a juice trick!

Another short fight, another Tiamat loss.  This time, though, Tiamat didn’t grovel.  She and Zaltu spoke and retired to yet another room in the warehouse, where Zaltu ate and Tiamat gestured and posed.  Insane on the face of it, but still a thin film of dross slowly seeped from her.

Gilgamesh
deciphered the interactions in the warehouse, finally: Zaltu had enslaved Tiamat and taken away her godhood.  Gilgamesh couldn’t cope, as Tiamat had him by the heart.  She wasn’t some damned animal like Zaltu.  She was a real woman.  Her name was Carol Hancock.  Zaltu?  The other Crows had named her the Skinner, and now Gilgamesh agreed.

Gilgamesh didn’t have the courage to take any of the miniscule amounts of dross flowing from Carol’s gestures and poses, but Ezekiel and Tolstoy did.  When she finished, Tolstoy and Ezekiel crept away from their hiding places, away from the warehouse.

Gilgamesh followed, not sure whether or not to be pleased.  He had dross.  Not as much as he liked, but Arm dross, even fresh and hot Arm dross, was filling and potent.  It would sustain him for days.

This wasn’t what he
had dreamed of all these months, though.  He had found Carol Hancock, but she had broken his heart.

He wished he had found Tiamat instead.

Damn but the kitchen floor in the rented VFW hall in Kansas City was uncomfortable.  Nine thuggish but well trained guards of first Focus Donna Fingleman held her prisoner, just so Doughy Donna could pull off a coup in the West Region Council representative election.

The floor just made the situation worse.

The clatter of pots and dinnerware echoed off steel and concrete in the oversized institutional kitchen.  Tonya’s own guards washed dishes.  At Donna the Dumpy’s orders.

Galling.

Tonya’s boss’s boss, Focus Shirley Patterson, had sent her here to interfere.  Shirley’s last phone instructions were to “…keep Donna from putting her pathetic stooge, Titus, on the Council.”  Tonya did her duty and politely passed along the order.  Donna’s flaming temper tantrum ended with Tonya and her crew’s capture.

According to Focus Laswell, the previous holder of the Council seat, Carrie Sue Sanderson, had been forced to resign after being caught paying off a Crow.  Sanderson’s suspicious resignation, along with Dumpy Donna’s comment about ‘Monster activity’ being unusually high recently in the Kansas City area, made Tonya suspect she didn’t know the full story.

If so, Shirley wouldn’t want Tonya to take this, well, sitting down.  Tonya forced her mind away from catty Fingleman insults.  She had to take control of the situation.

Donna’s guards, both Transform and non, shared the same steel-eye glare in their eyes and hard athletic bodies
as Focus Rizzari’s guards, which did nothing to quiet Tonya’s nerves.  Mixed gender as well.  Unlike the other first Focuses, Donna was as open to innovation as the more inventive younger Focuses.  However, did Donna train her people to resist Focus charisma?  Unlikely, as Donna had little charisma to play with.

Tonya was a master at Focus charisma.

She stood and tugged her carefully tailored teal suit into position.  Tonya had the magnetic charismatic presence of a nineteen-year-old movie star and the looks to go with it, despite her fifty-plus years of life.

Two of the guards turned
from the door to face her.  “Ma’am, you are to…” the left one said.  Tonya caught his eyes and he stopped.  She got the second a moment later.  Two others watched her from beside the ovens and they stepped forward with a frown. She used her well-trained Focus athletic enhancements to twirl in place and capture their gaze.  A moment later, she caught the eyes of the other five, who guarded Tonya’s entourage.

“Ignore me.  Wash those dishes!”
Tonya commanded Donna’s guards.  “Your Focus is depending on you.”

They complied
, meekly.  Right now Tonya didn’t care about the subtleties of her craft.

“Ideas, people,” Tonya said, to her entourage
, now freed from the dishes and gathered around her.  “Our goal is to bring this farce to a halt.”

---

Four hours later, as the kitchen clock read five minutes after three in the morning, Donna stalked into the kitchen, a brace of guards around her.  She was a rare creature, an ugly Focus, with limp brown hair, a puffy face, and about 40 pounds of extra weight.  “What’s the meaning of this!” she bellowed, hands on her hips, glaring at Tonya.

Tonya smiled
up from where she sat comfortably on one of Donna’s kitchen chairs.  “I’d say your guards aren’t as well trained as you think.”

Ten minutes ago, Tonya
had sent one of Vivian’s Transforms, who had been serving as a waiter, out with a note for Donna.  ‘Hang it up for the night – you’re deadlocked.’  The Focuses in the meeting looked as tired as Tonya.

The stout first Focus turned her back on Tonya and
gave orders to her guards.  They ignored her.  She yanked on their juice until they fell to the floor, unconscious, and she still didn’t get any response from them.  She stalked back to Tonya.

Tonya
smiled and said nothing.  Her own bodyguards ringed her, weapons out.

“Give them back to me, bitch,” Donna said, her face dark red.  “I’ll ruin you for this.”

“You’ll do no such thing.  Sit.  Calm down.  Think things through.”

Her guards parted for Donna, who sat, calmed down, and started to think.  Tonya’s charisma got through to the first Focus because Donna let herself get upset.  Tonya was thankful Donna hadn’t barged in earlier, giving
Tonya enough time to rest and regain her edge.  Her earlier charismatic gambit with the guards had overextended her, farther toward low juice than she liked.

“Shirley may have made you untouchable and given you permission to play games with your charisma, but you’re still going to regret it,” Donna said.

Tonya anted up.  “Shirley doesn’t want any more of your well-owned flunkies on the Council.  She wants a Focus with some spine.  She isn’t going to force you to choose any of your local political enemies as Council rep, though.”

“Those orders don’t excuse you for charismatically controlling
my
guards.”

“I wouldn’t have done so if you hadn’t bundled me off to the kitchen with
your own
unnecessary strong arm tactics,” Tonya said, and leaned forward, close to Donna, and whispered.  “Don’t even think of messing with my household in Philadelphia, either,” she said.  “I have an Arm in my back pocket who considers tagged Transforms a rare delicacy
and I’m more than willing to use her.
”  Tonya couldn’t afford to hold back if she expected to get out of this scrape intact.

Donna didn’t flinch from the Arm threat.  “An Arm you can’t even talk to on the phone.”  She snorted.  Damn.  She knew about Tonya’s Keaton problems.  “You interfered in the meeting with your damned charisma.  Shirley’s not going to appreciate this.”

Tonya shook her head.  “No, I didn’t interfere.  I just made sure that a goodly number of your invited Focuses knew about Shirley’s wishes.”  Tonya smiled, then, not a good smile.  “It was your generation of Focuses who taught all of us the power of notes under plates.”

Donna leaned back and calmed down even more, not at Tonya’s command.  The first Focus had surrendered.

“I see.  This never happened,” Donna said, speaking about both Tonya’s capture and her takeover of the guards.  “Officially.”  Donna closed her eyes and took several deep breaths.  “What happens next?”