All Beasts Together (The Commander) (33 page)

He found an adequate
hiding place next to the garbage cans behind the local Kroger.  He slipped between the cans and the chain link fence just as the darkness consumed the last remnant of his mind.  He never remembered making it all the way to the ground.  The warm, welcoming darkness sucked him down.

Part 3
Athena

To conquer oneself is a greater task than conquering others.

- The Buddha

Chapter
8

A Focus can tag anything, even the air.  A Focus can manipulate the juice in anything she tags.  This is often very dangerous
, but all the Focus advanced tricks are derived from these two facts.

“Inventing Our Future”

Carol Hancock: January 20, 1968

I wanted to scream triumph to the universe.  Yell defiance to the heavens themselves.  Bellow and shriek until the ground echoed.

I won, damn it!  This asshole fucker who attacked me was bleeding his guts out at my feet and I was the meanest, toughest thing
who ever walked the whole fucking earth.  The whole earth ought to damned well know it.

I wanted to fight that Chimera again and carve him to bloody shreds.  Or fight or kill something else.  Or destroy something.  Or fuck something.  I felt like fire ran through my veins, as well as adrenaline and the remnants of burnt juice.  Simple lust.  Kill lust.  The pure giddy high of victory.

I did love a good fight.  I kicked the black shell of the Chimera’s corpse.  I had now tied Keaton in the Chimera kill race because of this imbecile, one to one.  Take that, teacher!

“You’re dead, you bastard,” I
said to Bug-boy, my voice hoarse.  “That’s what you get for challenging
me
.  You come poaching on
my territory
, I’ll carve your fucking intestines out with a
spoon
.”  I kicked him again and a gusher of thick blood sluiced out as my kick moved a shoulder to expose a long cut in his neck.  For a moment I thought about taking a trophy, and inspiration struck.

I
would take all of him.

I laughed.  Even to my own ears
my laughter sounded harsh.  He was
mine
.  I would take all of him and make him a present to the people I counted as friends.  Zielinski would love this and I bet the dark-hearted Lori would get all properly excited as well.  This asshole Chimera, who challenged me in my own territory, would be spilling his secrets for years as my friends slowly cut his body into tiny snippets glued to many glass slides.

Flakes of snow started falling on me, big airy snowflakes blown off the lake, and I cooled down enough to think. 
My gift idea presented one major problem: actually getting the Chimera corpse to Rizzari’s Boston household, where Zielinski lived.  I couldn’t ask her people to pick it up in Chicago without blowing my cover.  I didn’t trust anybody, not even my friends.

Nobody
ever
takes my kills away from me.  I only regretted Zielinski and Rizzari wouldn’t get to carve him up while he still lived.  The thought was so intense it sent a shiver through me. 
Nobody
poaches my turf.

I
felt myself grinning a tight angry grin and I danced on the tips of my toes, still tense and ready for a fight.  Ready to take on anything and everything that might challenge me, such as the young Crow who showed up before the Beast Man arrived.  What the hell was he doing at the China Garden at the same time as the Beast Man?  He was gone now but he wasn’t long gone.  I itched to track him down and squeeze him for every secret he concealed in his little rabbity soul.  Maybe he knew why I hadn’t sensed the Beast Man until he was practically on top of me.

However
, dammit, I had just held a major fight in a parking lot right next to a moderately busy street.  The street wasn’t busy so late at night, but at least three cars had gone by while we fought and almost certainly the police would be here soon.  If I wanted my Chimera corpse I would have to get it out of here.  Now.  I didn’t want the police sniffing around the Tiens, nope, not at all.

Dam
mit, I swore to myself.  I was thinking about this all wrong.  From what I learned from Rumor, mutual favors mediated Crow society.  Rumor had asked me, in return for his help, to help a needy Crow in the future.  Maybe this counted.  If Chimeras hunted Crows I had saved this Crow’s bacon.  In any event, by warning me, this Crow also did me a favor.

So
mething about this young Crow warning me about the Chimera struck me as cute.  Maybe the poor fellow was as alone in the world as me, scared as shitless as I was when I allowed myself to think about my situation.  Made sense, with the numbers of goddamned Chimeras I kept running into in the area.  He would be staying close to any allies he might find.

Also, as the burn and the adrenaline faded, I realized I was a little more wounded than I re
cognized in the heat of combat.  Even the limited burns I allowed myself had cost me juice.  The rest of the lusts were fading, but not the kill lust.  My juice monkey was hungry.  I needed juice.

N
ot now, though.  I needed to hurry.  Bug-boy’s corpse was too large for the trunk of my car, but the Crow had conveniently left his pickup truck across the street.  I could use that truck to haul the corpse and then search the truck for information and pick up the Crow’s scent.  Good all the way around.

Sudden wooziness reminded me of my wounds.  A kill would be a very good idea.  Bug-boy’s saw-edged fingers had torn through an awful lot of my skin
, and an awful lot of the blood in the vicinity did seem to be my own.

No sleep, I told myself firmly.  I needed th
e corpse.  I staggered my way back to the door of the China Garden, where Mama and Papa and Grandma Tien peered wide-eyed from the window through a crack in the worn velvet drapes.  I opened the door and they all three jumped into the air, staring at me with appalled horror.

I did present a rather astonishing picture. 
Blood soaked me from head to foot, and little remained of my expensive business suit.  I still carried two bloody knives and I realized I held a piece of black chitinous tentacle besides.  Just your friendly neighborhood demon from hell.

They stared and didn’t say a word.  They
had always suspected I was something unusual, but now they were far beyond suspicion.  They wondered if I was even human.

They s
till didn’t suspect my gender, though.  With the blood and the ragged remnants of my clothes, my sex remained at least as much a mystery as always.

I transferred the second knife and the tentacle to my left hand, and dug into the remnant of my pants pocket, hanging loose at my side.  I found my keys and then tore the pocket further as I pulled them out, as the fabric of the pocket stuck to the drying blood on my hand.

I held the keys out to Mr. Tien.  They were soaked in blood and he was going to have to wash them before he could use them.  Little threads of fabric stuck to the back of my hand.

“Take my car and hide it,” I
said, in the kindest voice I could manage.  “I’ll want it later.”

He didn’t move.  He just stared at me as if he was amazed anything so monstrous
was capable of speech.  I didn’t move and held the keys in front of me.

“Take them,” I
said.  “And clean the Monster blood off the parking lot before it freezes.”  People at least knew about Monsters.

He took the keys with a cringe.  As soon as he did, I put him out of my mind.  I had real work to do.

The work was definitely real.  The corpse was damned near impossible to move.  It must have been 700 pounds and I couldn’t even lift the damned thing unaided.  I had to bring the truck over to the China Garden parking lot and burn some of my precious remaining juice to leverage that corpse into the truck.  I liked good exercise and all, but this was a bit much.

Worse
, the Crow’s fleabag excuse for a motor vehicle stalled as I loaded and stalled again as I tried to restart it.  Hot-wiring a car is a pain in the ass anyway and worse when the vehicle is a run-down wreck.  However, by the time I finished the police still hadn’t arrived.  I must have gotten lucky, for once.

I couldn’t afford to assume
, so I drove back to my place, over a dozen miles.  The piebald truck stalled four times on the way, but I made it.

---

The corpse looked incongruous all alone in a meat packer’s truck, but the meat packer’s truck was the only vehicle available with its own freezer.  I ditched the Crow’s truck when I made off with the meat packer’s truck.  Inside the meat packer’s truck I packed an immense metal packing crate with dry ice, dropped Bug-boy in, and sealed it up.  I had talked to Focus Warren over the phone.  She didn’t like the hassle of picking up the truck in Green Bay and having her people drive it to Boston and Rizzari, but I made the job worth her while.  Three thousand wasn’t much to me these days, but a godsend to the poor black Focus, especially since all they had to do was drive a truck to Boston and back.  I dropped the meat packer’s truck off in the place I designated in my phone call, and watched and waited from a distance until her household people picked it up and drove off.

That left the question of the Crow.  Despite his promise he didn’t contact me.  I didn’t blame him one bit.  I tracked the Crow’s truck through its registration information to a fictitious address in Memphis.

I searched the truck for personal effects, anything
to give me a hint of the owner.  I found nothing at all.  I wanted to bang my hand on the dashboard.  People always leave signs of themselves behind.  It was inhuman for someone to be so perfect.

Inhuman like a Major Transform.  Th
e thought brought a smile to my face.

Th
is young Crow was a puzzle gnawing at my mind.  I couldn’t figure him out and I couldn’t give up.  He was worse than the Chimera in some ways.  The Chimeras I thought I understood, except for the part about this one sneaking up on me.  Crows were a mystery.

He was a young Crow.  I thought about the terrified way he faced me and had the oddest sensation I had run into something truly wild for the first time in my life.
A shy and hidden creature from the deep forest, not one of those half-tamed pets that were most of humanity.  I had never run into a normal human I thought beyond my control at some level, if I did the necessary work.  Not this terrified creature in the alley.  I might kill him but I wouldn’t be able to tame him.  I could deal with him, but I would have to tone myself down.  A lot.

I began to see other possibilities for the long term.  Major Transforms
specialized, but we all had a few extras.  Stuffed with hubris as always, I chose Athena – Goddess of Wisdom and War – as my role model.  I wanted other Major Transforms working with me so the benefits of their talents would add to mine.  I just didn’t know enough about their talents to know how things would work.  I thought of an ecology of Transforms, which would work at the primitive level of territories, fighting and conflict, as well as at the civilized level, dealing with businesses, governments, and the arts.  Focuses seemed to specialize in big organizations, obvious from what they were already doing with things like the Network.  Arms did smaller organizations, which meant us Arms needed to work with the best people, not thugs like my current crew.  A Chimera partner would be nice but I didn’t have any idea how to go about finding one with any interest in civilization.  Crows looked like an easier project, at least for me.

Toning myself down with the Crow would also be good practice for healing what had come between Bobby and
me.  He cringed whenever I showed up, and his cringes ate me up inside.  I had done him wrong and I knew it.  I had been a fool trying to work out my anger from my failed marriage and my anger against Keaton by beating up on Bobby.  I didn’t have to dominate him like Keaton had dominated me; I dominated him enough by being an Arm and I didn’t have to put extra effort into it.  Hell, I dominated Bobby in so many ways I would need to work hard
not
to dominate him.

Besides, with my enhanced senses, I cooked better than any normal.  It made sense for me to cook instead of Bobby.  So there.

Zielinski’s quote about instincts applied to me as much as to the goddamned Crow.

Henry Zielinski: January 21, 1968

“Amy?”

“Got it,” she said.  Amy walked over from the weights, picked up the basketball, and passed it to Bill.  Bill and Parker were playing some impromptu Transform one-on-one.  All his trainee test subjects were in the gym this afternoon. Basketball, weights, whatever struck their mood.  Zielinski hadn’t come up with anything specific he wanted them to do.  Yet.

Zielinski watched the basketball game. 
Lori’s parents had added the gym to the house years ago, when Lori as a teenager became serious about gymnastics.  Weights, gymnastics equipment and mats cluttered the gym, with a single basketball hoop tucked in the far corner. The place smelled of healthy sweat.  He had been working on this project for three months and he still didn’t have anything to show for his efforts other than a fancy theory and some compelling statistics. The Focus hadn’t sold him down the river yet, though, so he had to admit he had never had so much fun in his life.