Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (9 page)

On the way out of Chattanooga, we stopped at random cheap diner and watched a heavyset man snarl at a meek wife who sported a black eye under heav
y makeup.  Keaton narrowed her eyes and I predicted trouble.  Twenty minutes later we followed the couple out to their car and staged a robbery.  I lifted the cash, added a few bruises to the woman’s collection while I knocked her unconscious, and Keaton, no surprise, made off with the man.

She took the three of us to a lumberyard, closed for the night, where
she tied the man backwards over a stack of two by fours and proceeded to work out her hostilities.

I wondered sometimes why wife-beaters bothered her so much.  Certainly she wasn’t defending the woman, and given her own abusive habits she had no basis to complain of some other abuser’s actions.  Maybe she considered them competition.

She didn’t want my help this time.  She hadn’t wanted my help with her toys since I returned from California.  After the first couple, I understood that she had forced me to participate earlier only because she wanted to rouse what she considered my predatory instincts.  And because I hated it, of course, so she got two victims for the price of one.  Now that I had come to enjoy the cruelty, she felt no need to give me the pleasure.

Instead
, she talked as she entertained herself with the man, telling me how I would be her victim tonight except for my current lack of juice.  How I should be grateful to her for the work she had done on my knee, because of how my miserable low juice gave me protection.

Usually, I ignored such minor harassment, but low juice made me vulnerable, and Keaton always knew how to push my buttons. 
When we finally slept, still at the lumberyard, still inhaling the vapors of death and agony, the pain from my knee found echoes in my dreams.  I dreamed of my early days in Keaton’s hands, the endless torment, the madness, the terror, and the slow collapse of the self.

I woke up screaming after only an hour. 
As an Arm, I only needed a couple of hours of sleep each night, but one hour wasn’t sufficient.  I stayed awake anyway, watching the night and the dead body of the wife beater, trying to ignore the ache in my knee.  Keaton, fortunately, left me alone and went back to sleep.

I had sold my soul to the devil.  I knew this, I made the deal voluntarily, and I
had been granted the pleasures as well as the pains of hell.  Yet, I couldn’t help wishing – couldn’t there be more to life than this?

The next day we hit Memphis.  I was groggy with lack of sleep, stupid with low juice, aching and limping with my bad knee, and cranky with general bad attitude.  Of course, as in all our joint hunts, Keaton couldn’t resist taking advantage.  She would always divide the territory we hunted, such that she got all the prime areas and I got the shit: the suburbs, the industrial districts, the shopping centers and the usual utter crap.  I figured I had today and tomorrow to find juice before I became too low on juice to hunt at all, at which point I figured a worse lesson would ensue.

In any event, three
miserable hours into my hunt in Memphis I found something strange.  I had been taking a wide swing south of the Memphis airport to get to another not-so-prime hunting area, out in the semi-rural areas south of town.  In fact, if the main road I planned to use hadn’t been closed due to construction I would have never spotted the anomaly at all.

I couldn’t believe my metasense when I spotted it out in the middle of nowhere, so I just stopped and watched for five minutes to
verify I wasn’t hallucinating.  Low on juice, and on my wobbly knee, hallucinations were a real worry.  Eventually, I convinced myself.  Then, after a massive application of willpower, I went off to get Keaton.  Despite what my juice monkey wanted, no way would I tackle anything this strange on my own.  Especially in my current state.

“This had better be good, Hancock, or you’re going to…”  Keaton stopped her threat when she got a look at me.  I had come into her metasense range and she had immediately pulled off the road and parked in front of some lawyer’s small office.  Ever the good student, I came to her, and stood at attention beside her now open driver’s side window.  “Out with it.  Now!”

It took work to damp my Arm urges to dominate right now and I almost missed.  “Ma’am,” I said, and took three deep breaths.  Keaton glared, intolerant; she
had caught my display, as always able to read my mind with ease.  “I found two prey Transforms and nine Monsters south of town.  Not moving.  Close together.”  I didn’t attempt to cover my reactions or my emotions.  I wanted Keaton to read the truth in me.  The whole idea of clusters of Monsters scared the crap out of me.  I also knew how annoyed I would be if someone interrupted my hunt.

“What else did you find out?”

“I didn’t want to approach the place, ma’am, before informing you.”

“Huh.”  Keaton studied me, got out of her car, and led me around the corner to the side of the small office, where we weren’t quite so obvious from the street.  “I’m going to ask you to think some dangerous thoughts, Hancock.  Do a good job.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  What was this?

“Think about attacking me.”

I panicked momentarily, this being far too close to my repressed reaction of a moment ago.  Keaton crossed her arms and frowned.  All right.  I let my anger through and thought about attacking her.  I suspect it was beyond believable.

She nodded, but
did not otherwise react.  “Think about what you’ve said to Focuses, today.”

No problem.  I had never talked to a Focus in my life.

“Think about your last trip to Pittsburgh.”

I had never been to Pittsburgh.  Keaton insisted I stay out of the Pittsburgh area, for no apparent reason.  I had obeyed.

Keaton nodded again.  “Think about your conversations with the authorities today.”

Ah.  Understanding seeped in to my low-on-juice fuzzy mind.  She feared someone or something had messed with my head and my discovery was a trap for her.  Again, I hadn’t said anything to any authorities today, so this was also easy.

Keaton ran through several more screwy questions, including one about my last conversation with Dr. Zielinski.  I hadn’t seen him since St. Louis.

“We’ll take both cars.  You lead, but stop when we’re at the edge of our range,” Keaton said.  She didn’t explain about the obscure interrogation.  She expected me to figure it out on my own.  I climbed in my car and led the way.

Keaton was paranoid.  Well, so was I after I had examined the place.  Shit, fleeing as if the dogs of hell nipped at our heels looked damned appealing.  Monsters were, well, dumb Monsters by definition.  They didn’t come in packs…at least until right now.

I drove back to the dirt road south of the airport, then stopped my car and got out when I metasensed the Monsters again.  Keaton got out of her car, as well.  She motioned me forward and we went a couple hundred feet closer, cross-country
through elderberry and poison ivy into a dense forest.  Then she motioned me to halt and ducked down in the hollow of a small creek.

“What do you make of this?” she asked, whispering.

I metasensed again and shook my head.  “I still count nine Monsters, eight who aren’t moving and one who is.  Two woman Transforms, no Focus tags.  I’d swear now that two of the Monsters have Focus tags.”  I kept my voice at a whisper.  Keaton nodded at my last comment.  “One of the Monsters, the one who’s moving, is above the others.  On the second floor of a house, perhaps?”

Keaton shook her head.  “I think the other eleven are in a cellar.”

“It’s a trap,” I said.  “The two prey haven’t moved an inch.  They must be under duress.”

“A trap is a possibility,” Keaton said.  “The FBI’s used bound Transforms as bait before.  I’ve never seen anything like this, though.  Monsters are loners and they’ll fight anything they can reach.”

My anxiety grew.  I thought Keaton already knew everything.

“Should we leave, ma’am?  Run?”  Leave the juice behind?  I suffered my juice monkey in silence.

Keaton licked her lips.  “Not until we’re sure we can’t take the Transforms.”  I nodded and nearly dropped into a stalk.  “We need to figure out what’s going on.  If either of us blundered into a pack of Monsters at close range, while hunting alone…”  Keaton let her whisper trail off.  Yes, something like that could easily be a threat.  Hell, old organized Monsters might be more than a threat.  They could be
fatal
.

I nodded
again.  She motioned me to move to the side.  I hobbled away from her about ten feet, through the trees and scrub brush.  She signaled for me to stop moving away and motioned us forward.  We moved slowly and as quietly as my aching knee permitted, then after another signal, we circled to the north.  Ah.  She wanted us downwind.  We had been coming in from the northwest and the wind today was blowing from just west of south.

Fifteen minutes later, she stopped, and motioned me to come over to her.  I slipped as silently as I was capable of through the brush.
  Damn, I felt like hell.  My knee hurt, my mind felt like mush, and my juice monkey screeched like some lunatic demon from Bedlam.

“What do you smell?” she asked.

“Forest.  Trees, dead leaves, mold.  Like that.”

Keaton frowned.  “You can’t smell Transforms?”

I shook my head.  My sense of smell was good, but not that good.

“Huh.”  She motioned us forward again, another couple hundred feet, putting us about a thousand feet away from the house
, in a stand of young oaks growing up around the collapsed remains of some fallen giant of the species.  She knelt, and motioned me down beside her.  She had found a faint footprint of something monstrous in the rich loam.

“Smell that?” she asked, at a whisper.

“In the footprint?”

“What…”
She was about to say ‘what footprint?’, but she stopped when she found it.

I stuck my nose in the footprint and sniffed.  There was something off about it.  After I sniffed for a few moments, I picked out a Transform scent.  How in the hell had she caught the scent from absolutely nothing?

“I’d say my sense of smell is significantly better than yours, Hancock…and your eyesight is better than mine,” Keaton said, a quiet whisper.

I nodded.  “I swear
I’m smelling a male Transform, ma’am.”  In my current low juice state, I wanted to run everything by Keaton before acting on it.  In this state, I often made mistakes.

“Perhaps.  The male version of the Arm has a Monster form.  It’s why they’ve been missed by the authorities,” Keaton said.  I shivered at Keaton’s revelation.  I hadn’t known.  “This one has the footprint of a huge dog or wolf.  I wonder what the other one’s like?”

“Other one?”  Male Arms!

Keaton nodded.  “I smell another one.  And calm down, Hancock.  The other reason the male version of the Arm has been missed by authorities is they’re as stupid as Monsters.”

Oh.  “Is there a male version of the Focus, ma’am?”  The obvious question.

Keaton rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.

Which meant ‘yes’.  “Are these things here?”

“I don’t think so.  I don’t metasense anything abnormal and the scent is at least a week old.”

I had no clue how she picked up age on a scent this faint, so I just shrugged.

“Could they be the Monsters we’re sensing?”

Keaton nodded.  “I’ve never encountered one personally.  However, we should be able to tell by scent when we get closer to the place.”  I shivered again.  Monster-stupid wouldn’t give us enough of an edge if these male Arms were as large as their prints indicated.

She motioned us to spread out again and I followed her lead as we moved forward.  Three hundred feet closer in, through a nearly impenetrable forest, I found another set of tracks along a rough trail.  I motioned for her to come over.

Faint claw marks.  And, dammit all, another set of tracks.  Footprints.  No scent on the footprints, though.

“Lizard,” Keaton said, now whispering in my ear.  “A male Arm in lizard form.”  I pointed to the footprints.  Keaton jumped, knives suddenly filling her hands.  Then she knelt down and sniffed the footprints.  A moment later, she collected herself again.

“Either those are old footprints, or someone has a nasty trick.  Those tracks didn’t even leave the scent of shoes!”

I studied the two sets of tracks.  “Ma’am,” I whispered into her ear.  “Each set of tracks is equally as old as the other.  Days.”

She looked back and forth at the two sets of tracks.  “I’ll take your word for it,” she said, quiet.

“Could this trick be something a male Focus might use?”
I asked.

“Yes,” she said.  “This fits what little I know about them.”  Crap.

She motioned us city slicker Arms forward, nevertheless.

We paralleled the trail, which did lead to the Monsters and Transforms’ lair, an old abandoned farmhouse, nearly fallen in, in a clearing in the forest.  By the time we reached the farmhouse I
had picked out thousands of tracks, mostly those of our two male Arms.  I found several tracks, though, of a naked human foot with claws, neither male nor fully Monster.  I guessed the prints were from the Monster walking around in the house.  Keaton also pointed out the male Arm prints weren’t the same size and shape.