The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (18 page)

Darryl showed up, finally, running in from the kitchen, and snatched the little girl into his arms.  He was a big black man, with an afro that practically filled the doorway, but he was a teddy bear at heart.  He got a look at Tom and me, and flushed.

“Boss, Sir,” he said to Tom and me.  “Sorry about this.  I was in the kitchen getting the kids a snack, and…”

“Out.  Take Stephanie and get out of here.”  Then I spotted Ila’s other two kids peering around him to see what the excitement was about.  “And the rest of them, too.”

He got.  I flopped back down on the bed.

“Fuck.  We’ve got to get a real house.  I sure as shit hope Ila finds something while she’s out.”

“Uh huh,” Tom said, disgusted.

I looked over at him, and raised an eyebrow.  He smiled back at me.  Then he slipped of the bed and knelt at the edge.

“I’m yours,” he said.  “I’m going to kiss your feet.”  He pulled one of my feet over to him, and proceeded to suck on my toes, one by one.

Oooh, there went the last of my good intentions.  All I had left was a grin and a moan and some very urgent needs.  If any more of Ila’s kids showed up, they would just get to watch, because I wasn’t stopping now.

Later that night, after an unexpected and unwanted nightmare about unseen boogie-monsters chasing me around, I snuck into the Iron Man Gym.

A gym. 
Disgusting.
  Once, my home included a basement filled with gym equipment, a full setup, enough so that I didn’t have to use the public gyms.  The gym was gone now, burned into char with the rest of my house.  Then I used the warehouse storeroom in my back-up Chicago place and Greg’s new set of gym equipment.  Well, I hoped the FBI enjoyed my fancy gym, because they inherited the equipment when they grabbed my backup lair.  Now?  Sneaking into gyms, like a junior Arm just out of her training.

I couldn’t skip the whole exercise business, because I was an Arm.  Bad things happened to Arms who didn’t keep their muscles in condition, as I knew from personal experience.

Iron Man Gym was a bodybuilder’s gym, located in an old commercial and light industrial district just east of River Rouge Park, and they possessed the equipment I needed most.  As I crept into the gym, I smelled an odor.

A gym is a place of many odors, and I knew them and expected them: old sweat, metal, chalk, and mold.  Dozens of different odors.  I knew them.

I didn’t expect the scent of an Arm.

Another Arm in Detroit.  Damn.  I had been right when I picked up the earlier Arm signs.  For a moment, my mind played its devious tricks on me.  As with many of the gyms these days that played to a rough crowd, the Iron Man Gym had Arm posters all over the place.  Yes, Arm posters, Mary Sibrian’s idea.  One of the ways she made her money.  Underground as all hell, but every bong shop on the planet sold the damn things.  We had all had fun posing, even Keaton, all of us disguised enough to keep the posters from being a security risk.  Not only disguised, but Mary herself did the airbrushing afterwards to hide distinctive features and add false distinctive features.  I, for instance, didn’t have a Marine Corp tattoo on my right biceps.

Haggerty had personally signed her poster, and for a moment, the recent Arm smell and Amy Haggerty’s lingering scent on the poster made me believe Haggerty had decided to claim Detroit, just to piss me off.  I practically knifed the damned poster before I got a grip.  The stench wasn’t Haggerty.  I knew her scent too well.

No, this Arm wasn’t one I had ever smelled before.

The bitch probably thought Detroit was her territory.  Right, sure.  The only Arms besides Keaton and Haggerty able to challenge me for a territory and win were Armenigar in Canada and Eissler in West Germany.  This scent wasn’t theirs.

Was this Haggerty’s theorized secret uberpowerful enemy?  Given her current winning streak, I couldn’t discount the possibility.

The night was hell, watching over the gym every minute, waiting for the Arm to show.  The day was no better.  The thought of some other powerful Arm in my territory triggered my Arm instincts in a very bad way.  Territory is life for an Arm.  The possibility gnawed at me.  I couldn’t think.  I paced and raged and worried.  My stomach churned, and I couldn’t eat properly.  My muscles got stiff from the lack of exercise and the long inaction of the night.

At eleven the next night, the last muscle man left the Iron Man Gym and the manager locked the doors.  I watched from the gravel and tar roof of the small office building across the street.  No sign of the Arm.

I made myself inconspicuous, masked my metapresence, the works.  The element of surprise might make all the difference in the world in the off chance I faced super-Arm, and so I damped my juice emanations like a paranoid senior Crow adulterer.  I would wait until the Arm got heavily involved in her workout, say, doing chest presses, and then take full advantage of the situation.

Three, almost four hours passed.  The mosquitos held a fiesta and invited all their friends and families.  I still didn’t move.

At 2:43 in the morning, she came.

She slipped quietly up to the door and opened it with a key.  She eased inside.

I followed.

After all the hours of anger and fear and tension, the actual fight turned out to be an anti-climax.  I burned juice when I charged, catching her doing something that would have been seated toe raises if she hadn’t been messing up her form.  I moved with all my speed and skill, and slammed her against the wall.  I knocked the breath out of her and broke several ribs.  My knife went into her gut, and then again into her right armpit and cut the muscles there, then I grabbed her left arm and tore the shoulder out of its socket.  To finalize the deal I plunged my knife into her chest just under her breastbone and rested the knife against her heart.

Only then did I realize I didn’t face super-Arm.  My enemy hadn’t even attempted to fight back.  Hell, by the time my knife touched her heart, she had only started to scream.

“No!  No!  Please!”

I cut her off with a vicious blow across the face.  Then, still holding my knife in her chest, I let her sink to the ground.

She whimpered and mewed with agony and fear.  Tears flowed out of her eyes.  Tears!  From an Arm!  She was a pitiful and repulsive creature.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” I said.  Fury and the now unnecessary fear made my voice harsh enough to astonish even me.

“I’m sorry!  I didn’t mean to!  Please!” she said, between sobs.

I hit her again.  The skin on her face split, and her eye began to swell.

“Answer the question, bitch.  Who are you?”  My voice filled with fury, fury at her for invading my turf, and fury at her for scaring me so much.

“Chrissie.  I’m Chrissie Duval,” she said, through her sobs.  She shivered.  She kept trying to move her useless arms toward the knife in her chest, but she couldn’t make them function.

“What are you doing here?  Where did you come from?  Are you the one behind the Phoenix Church Massacre?”

She gasped several times and tried to form words, but she just huddled and shivered and cried.

I hit her again across the face.  She cried some more.

She possessed no self-control; this was almost like dealing with a normal.  From her smell, though, this Arm hadn’t transformed recently.  The initial transformation was long over.

Fuck.  I would get nothing out of her this way.  I pulled my knife from her chest.  She did her best to curl into a ball, arms still flopping uselessly, and she cried hysterically.

I studied her and shook my head.  Her muscles weren’t built right, all lumpy, bulging in odd places, and too small.  She appeared to be more like one of Keaton’s students than a mature Arm.  A flawed student.  She was likely dead unless Keaton or Zielinski found some way to fix her muscles.

This wasn’t a challenge, this was a joke.  Fury still filled me, but letting loose my fury wouldn’t buy me anything more than a few hours of entertainment.  I wanted more out of this fool than a session with my beast.  I had already let my beast out of her cage twice since the FBI shut down my Chicago businesses.

I lifted her up with one hand and pinned her against the wall by the neck.  With my other hand, I laid my knife across her neck.

“Where are you from?”

Her sobs caught in her throat as she tried to force words out.  I flicked a little bit of skin loose with the point of my knife, and she shivered.  The smell of her terror rolled off her in waves.

“T-T-Toronto.”

So she was a Canadian Arm, with enough native talent to hide her accent.  The idiot must have pissed off the Ontario Local of the International Sisterhood of Socialistically Stupid Focuses, who probably sweet-talked Armenigar into coming by and chasing this moron out of Canada.

“What the fuck are you doing here, skag?”

“Please,” she said, whimpering, as tears mixed with blood leaked down her cheeks.

I slammed her against the wall again, hard.  Her head hit with a bang and she screamed, a small, breathless sound that cut short when I pushed my knife against her throat again.  Blood ran down her neck from the knife’s sharp edge and she swallowed convulsively.

“I asked you a question, bitch.  I didn’t tell you to grovel.  When I want groveling, I’ll damned well let you know. 
Answer the fucking question!
”  Jesus Christ, what a loser.  No self-control, no competence, and she couldn’t even grovel decently.  Even one of Keaton’s students managed decent courtesy in a couple of weeks, and after a couple of months learned enough self-control to avoid falling apart during heavy questioning.  Did this woman get no training at all?

“I-I-I was l-looking for a city,” she said, barely, through her sobs and shivers.  Her limbs twitched helplessly, raising an urge inside me to cut ribbons from her skin.

“How old are you?”

“Teheheh…Twenty-six.”

I slammed her into the wall again, disgusted.  “Since your transformation, idiot.”

“F-Four months.”  Damn.  Surviving four months without training was damned good for any Arm.

“Have you ever been to Phoenix?”

“Fa-fa-fa-feeeniix?  Where’s that?”

“Arizona.”

“Na-na-no.  Na-na-na-never.”

Nope, not the Arm behind the church massacre.  I dropped her onto the floor, and she fell with a crash.  Then she tried to get her feet under her and I pushed her over again.

“Now you can grovel.”

She looked at me with a horrified expression of complete incomprehension.  Hell.  She didn’t even know how to grovel.  How could someone this ignorant have survived this long?  Why hadn’t Armenigar put this doofus out of her misery?

Unless Armenigar arranged this as a test.  I laughed.  To test Keaton, who had been living in Detroit not that many months ago.  Armenigar, the unstoppable force of nature, had delivered a baby Arm to Keaton to train.  In her own screwball way.  Just to see what would happen.

Duval did manage enough sense to stay on the floor, and she watched me in utter terror.  I stared down at her and thought.  What should I do with her?

Baby Arm.  No training.  No home.  She still thought and reacted like a normal, and what little mind she had was ruled by her body and the juice.  Someone like this should be locked tight in a training regimen, with her trainer doing all her thinking for her.  In all the world, I swear there’s no creature stupider than a baby Arm.  She would likely die within a month.  One of us Major Transforms would take pity on the world and put this Duval thing out of her misery.

So, did I want her?  If I picked her up, she would be a hell of a lot of work.  Training a new Arm would be a good test of my control, and she would eventually add to my stature, but I didn’t have the time.  I knew how much the baby Arm training ate into Keaton’s time.  Worse, Keaton already had two of the damn things, both low quality, and if I gave her Duval, she would probably cull the weakest to cut the workload.

Ah.  Webberly.  I did need a present to give her, to finalize our agreement.  I wanted to tag Rose Webberly bad, and I had been wooing her hard ever since Bass slipped my lure.  This would be perfect.  Webberly would be able to train Arms; after what Keaton did to her as a baby Arm, she had picked up iron self-control, better as a newbie mature Arm than mine was now.

No one had ever given a prospective subordinate Arm a present like this.  An Arm who took a baby Arm and made her real always had first dibs on her. Duval would be Webberly’s first Arm in her own personal organization…if Duval managed to survive the process.

So I let loose my beast, broke the bitch hard, and called Webberly.

---

“I ask that you make me yours.”

Webberly knelt by an old gravel pit thirty miles north of Detroit and the starlight showed only the barest hint of shadows on her brown face.

A couple hundred yards behind us, in the parking lot, a semi full of weight equipment chugged on diesel idle, Webberly’s gift to me.  She was damned good, and the truck’s contents provided yet more evidence of her skills.