All Beasts Together (The Commander) (38 page)

Lori turned away from Sky and rested her back on his side as they stood.  She wrapped his right arm around her and held on tight.
“Do normal men and women go through this nonsense?  Back and forth, push and shove…”

“…up and down, in and out,” Sky completed.  Lori giggled.  “Yes, but you have it worse than a normal.  So do I.  I’ve, well, been through a lot of messes like this before, my gracious lady.”  Sky recalled trying to figure out what to do when Beast – with a prick as long as his forearm – decided he was close enough to female to count and made a pass at him.  Situations like that will make you grow up fast.  Especially when you’re a Crow and don’t heal worth beans from that sort of abuse.

“Okay, then, what can we do to burn off this juice charge?  Run home through Southie?”  Southie?  Oh, yes, the bad part of Boston, Sky remembered.

“Remember, Lori.  I’m a Crow.  Besides, the bodyguard detail attempting to discreetly follow us a half kilometer back would just pick you up if you ran into trouble, and if I let you do anything idiotic they’d run me over on the way by.”

“Oh, you noticed them?  I was hoping…”  Lori giggled again.  “Forget what I just said.  I keep forgetting about your metasense.  Metasentences.  God, where did I get all this juice from?  I ran myself down to nothing last night, and I’d swear I’m…” Lori blushed.

“
Isn’t your lab around here somewhere? Maybe you can figure out what’s going on with you.”  She needed something to distract her.

“Yes,” she said.  “I like labs.  So do some of my more sexually experimental housemates.  They use the lab when they want to really go to town, if I’m not working there all night.  I guess they don’t want to shock the household.  I found their box of supplies when I
did an inventory.  Two person dildos.  Ball gags.  Whips.  Strap on dildos.  Shackles.  A lot of things I didn’t recognize at all.”  Lori paused.  Sky winced.  “I’m babbling again.”

“Why don’t you give me your car keys?”

“Sure,” Lori said.  “What’s my car doing here, anyway?”

“The obstacle course isn’t safe now, Sky.  The doctor is awake, and he’s very observ…”

“I thought you didn’t
plan everything down to the last five minutes anymore?”

“I don’t, silly.  I delegate that these days.”

“Have you ever wondered why your household has gone, eh, what do you call it, libertarian?”

“Surely there isn’t a connection.  Hey, where’d you go?”

“Up here,” Sky said.  Using the Crow whisper.  He stood on top of the climbing wall in the mini obstacle course.  Terrible waste of a tennis court, Sky decided.  “Jump up here with me!”

Lori w
alked to the bottom of the wall, and leapt up.  Probably a full meter, pretty good for someone of her size.  Not even close to high enough to join Sky.  “Well, that suddenly didn’t get any better,” Lori said, muttering something about having to work on her vertical leap because of the competition.  Sky blinked and Lori was standing next to him on top of the wall.

“How’d you get up here?”

“Climbed.  Fast.”  She smiled at him, and lowered her voice an octave and a half.  “Defend yourself, foul rogue!”  Feet, hands and arms came at him in a flurry Sky couldn’t follow.  He dove back, grabbed the end of the wall with his hands, let his body arc under the wall edge, and then over – with a summersault – and back on top of the wall on the other side of Lori.  Lori did a back flip and twist combination to land on top of the wall edge again, facing him.  Another flurry of feet, hands and arms came after him, so he ran backwards and did a prodigious back somersault towards the swimming pool.

Crunch.

“Ow, ow, ow, dammit, I forgot about the
ice
!” Sky said.  He had intended a backwards cannonball.  Instead, it was, well, embarrassing.  The ice might be only a scant half centimeter thick, and had bent down under his weight, but it was thick enough to hurt a lot – on his rear – where he landed.  Lori clambered down the wall like a monkey and ran over to help him up.

“Oh, let me kiss it and make it better,” Lori said, and cooed and clucked at him in quite a mock scene of sympathy.  As she talked, half kneeling down and fully bent over at the waist, so she
almost rubbed noses with him, the cracked ice underneath them splintered.

Half the adults in Lori’s household were looking out the windows of the main house at them.  So was the doctor, but not for long, because before he
got a good look at who was causing the commotion, the ice broke beneath them and plunged them into the water.

“So,” Sky said a half hour later, while being tended to
in the kitchen by Viola Harper, the late night cook.  Ann had been in and out twice to check on Lori and ignore Sky.  The household had amply wrapped both Lori and Sky in towels.  Lori’s giddiness was completely gone.  “Did I tell you about the surveillance crew I spotted watching your house back when Tim and Ann were training me?” Sky said.  He had forgotten.  “Does that sort of thing happen often?”

An hour of intricate discussion and household politics later, Sky burrowed into his attic nest alone
for the remainder of the night, and was on his way back to Toronto on Sunday.

Carol Hancock: February 1, 1968 – February 2, 1968

Because of my nigh
tmares and my never-ending feelings of impending doom, I gave a lot of thought to how I might improve my security arrangements.  For step one I got an office outside of my residence, with a phone and a phone number for distribution, to let me stay in contact with the Crow, Greg, the Tiens, and my thugs.  The office rental cost money, which I didn’t have enough of, so I had to raise more.

My office was two miles from my residence, in the north end of Skokie, the right half of an older home broken into two parts for office space. 
A shoe repair place occupied the other half, run by a couple of brothers who had emigrated from the Ukraine.  They neared retirement age, and had dragooned one of their sons into the business to carry on the tradition.  Just don’t call them Russians.  Calling them Russians was fight’n words.  Goddamn commies.

“Another armored car job, boss?” Luke said.  Luke Silverman,
a small-time crook, disliked my larger jobs.  He whined.

“Shaddup, Silverman,” Indy said.  Indy, no last name, didn’t even want to be a crook.  He just had
a theft problem with regard to his employers, which kept him from being able to hold a job.  “Gotta be better’n ourselves, yah know.”  When I first picked Indy up, he had a hard time succeeding at anything bigger than shoplifting and stealing mail from mailboxes.  I was teaching him the trade.  He wanted to be able to rob jewelry stores and bump off armored cars on his own someday.  Not damned likely.  The only thing preventing him from getting caught these days was me, breathing down his neck to keep him in line.

“Kalamazoo,” I said. 
I stood over a second hand dining room table I used for my maps.  Right now a well-marked Rand McNally road map of Michigan covered the table, stacked on top of maps of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  Rule number one was to avoid big heists in Chicago, especially in the northwest suburbs.  The Michigan police were likely getting real annoyed at me, as I treated southwest Michigan as the happy hunting ground.  “First Savings has a new head of security and I think he’s about to find out how difficult his job is.”  I would do nearly anything for an edge.

The phone
on the non-matching second hand credenza rang, and I picked it up.  “Yah?”

No sound came from
the other end of the phone for several long moments.  I waited.  “Thank you for the information on Moose Darlington.”  The voice whispered.  My Crow, again.  Hot damn.

I waved my crooks out of
the room and shut the pair of doors behind them.

“Did everything work out with him?”

“Yes.  I think he’s a fence, though.”

I repressed a
laugh.  Moose was
my
fence.  “Not many legit people are willing to deal with Transforms.”

“He doesn’t know you’re a Transform, Carol.”

“He knows I’m not legit myself, and that’s good enough.”  I paused.  “Your suggestion on what I should use as a graveyard has worked out very well.  Thank you.”  I still couldn’t convince the Crow to cough up any real information on what juice variant he actually utilized, but I had decided not to let that bother me.  In our last talk, I mentioned my criteria for the sort of place I used for dumping dead Transforms, and the Crow had told me of a place nearby where normals never went: the back part of a wood treatment plant, where they dumped the wood treatment chemical wastes.  The sticky mess reeked to high heaven.  The ground was so saturated with creosote and other chemical wastes that bodies didn’t bloat and decay, but instead were preserved, mummified.  No dead body smell.

“No problem.”

“Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you, what sort of name do you go by?  I’d like to think of you as a person, not just as ‘the Crow’.”

The Crow paused for a long while.  “Gilgamesh.”

“Gilgamesh.”  Interesting, especially with his connection to the Chimera, Enkidu.  I wondered how the male Major Transforms decided on names.

I
had gotten somewhere in my thinking on Transform ecology, starting with Arms.  I knew we couldn’t be ‘good’, by human definitions.  For a while, I had tried to be evil, again by human definitions.  I had fallen into the trap of trying to fit what I did into the normal human definitions.  Humans are tribal omnivores.  The Major Transforms aren’t the same.  Arms are primarily predators.  The behaviors that worked for Arms are different than normal human behaviors.

What were Crows?  Scavengers?  They were no more pure scavengers than Arms were pure predators.  We were both thinking, speaking creatures.  The predator and scavenger stuff
applied only to the animal parts of us.

Most of what humans consider
‘right’ is tied to survival. ‘Right’ is usually what helps the tribe, doing good to your neighbor.  ‘Evil’ things hurt the tribe’s survival: murder, theft, adultery and the like.  However, killing becomes acceptable when it’s against the tribe’s enemies. It’s called war, then, and not wrong at all.

What d
id this mean for Arms?  Arms are predators. There’s nothing wrong with being a predator. The world contains many predators and they serve a function.  It’s just different than being a normal human, and the rules of survival, and of good and evil, are different.  A ‘good’ tiger does different things than a ‘good’ rabbit or a ‘good’ monkey.

So, then, what are the rules for Arms?  If I could figure out the rules for Arms, the rules would illuminate where we fit in with the other Transforms and I
would also be figuring out what sort of things are good for the long term survival of Arms.  I had a few rules figured out.  First, Arms are predators.  Second, our natural prey is the Transform, in specific, the untagged Transforms not supported by Focuses.  Everyone else – children, adult non-Transforms, tagged Transforms, Focuses, Chimeras, most likely Crows, are not our prey, unless they got in our way.  Third, it was a mistake to hurt our own people, the ones we recruited to serve us.  I had learned that from my dealings with Bobby. The third lesson, from my third mistake.  I fervently hoped for no more.

This Crow was not my prey.

“I’ve been trying to come up with a way we can more easily warn each other about Beast Men.”  I preferred the name ‘Chimera’, but I decided to follow the Crow’s naming convention, at least for now.  No.  Gilgamesh, not ‘the Crow’.  “Do you have a telephone in your residence?”

“Not safe,” he said.  “Pardon.”

He still didn’t trust me.  Understandable, given the grief we had both been through in our short careers as Transforms.

“An office?  A workshop?”

“Sorry.”  Gilgamesh paused again, and I heard traffic noises.  “The Sunoco at the corner of Dempster and LeClaire has a phone booth around back that isn’t used very often.  If you call that number, I can hear the phone ring from where I live.”

Shit!  That was almost on top of me, less than a mile and a half from where I lived.  “Give me the number,” I said.  Gilgamesh did. 
I memorized it.  “You know where I live, don’t you?  You’re metasense range is longer than mine is, I’ll bet.”

“Yes.”

His metapresence was hard to pick up.  I had only noticed Gilgamesh when I had looked at him.  “Feel free to drop messages in my mailbox or leave a message with the normal man who lives with me.”

“Crows often use drop points,” he said.  “Messages tied to rocks.”

“I was thinking of something you told me in our last conversation, about all Crows being loners.  How do Crows communicate with each other if they’re such loners?”

Gilgamesh chuckled.  “Same as we’re doing.  Phone calls.  Letters.  Messages tied to rocks.  Sometimes we even meet in person.”  He paused.  “There used to be other Crows in Chicago, but they left when you showed up.”

“They vacated all of Chicago just because I moved in?”  I was appalled.  I had never hurt any Crows and still they left town when I arrived?

“They fear Arms attract too much attention.  I, however, prefer Arms to Focuses.  Focuses are dumb callous twits in my opinion.”