The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (40 page)

The filthy woman at the door was gaunt with starvation, and the hollow look in her eyes spoke of something not quite sane.

“Run.”  I put the full force of my very predatory presence into my one word.  She ran.  As did Bass, realizing this wasn’t a social visit.

I stalked into the old country farmhouse, my footsteps not drowning out the whimpering from below.  Another of Bass’s slaves, a man as gaunt as the woman, his body malformed and limping, fled from me in horror.

Bass finished her run up the stairs and she charged me, armed with a bloody knife, ready to do murder to defend her territory.  I crouched into my stalk and glided toward her, smooth and dangerous and on the hunt.  As soon as she saw me, though, Bass stopped dead and bowed in deference to me, giving rank.  Interesting.  I wasn’t mollified.

“Ma’am,” she said, a single breathless word, shocked at my presence, terror warring with uncertainty and territorial defense in her mind.  “What do you want with me here?”

I answered Bass’s question by laying her out before she could react, burning juice in the process.  The bitch surrendered immediately; she crawled over to me and groveled, screaming her humility and obedience.

“Get up,” I said, as I kicked her in the ribs and sent her flying into the cupboards.  She cowered as she stood, back against the sink and began the ‘yes ma’am’ routine.  I ignored her and looked around at her dusty house.  Something reeked here, beyond the death and destruction emblazoned in my nostrils, and I didn’t know what I sensed.  Anger and grief fed the dark beast inside of me.  This bitch cost me Sammy and Consuela, lost in the ashes of my burned home.  This bitch cost me
Chicago
.

“Show me around,” I said.  I thought I understood Bass and her wants and desires, an Arm reminding me of my pre-CDC withdrawal self.  Wrong.  I hadn’t ever done industrial scale cruelty, or even come close.

I needed to rectify my lack of understanding.  Now.

“Certainly, ma’am.  I’d be glad to,” she said.  Her chirpy, cheerful tone clashed with the blood and sweat dripping from her.  Underneath the natural terror of an angry senior Arm in her territory and the raw hostility sloshing inside her due to my dominance display and violation of her territory was something else.  Something calm, something of expectations met.  Her inner calm pissed me off, but I banked my hostility for the moment.  “If you’ll come this way, ma’am?”  She led me down into the basement.  “I’ve been researching the effects of pain and stress on normals and new Transforms.  I’ve been improving my interrogation abilities.”  Industrial strength sadism with a rationale.

She turned to watch me, hoping for some sign of my reaction to her words, but I gave none.

Her first three examples sickened even me.  Two men and a woman, confined, naked, in various stages of destruction.  Bass had one of the men laid out on a table, with large portions of his skin flayed off and pinned carefully back.  Blood ran in little rivers to a drain in the floor.  He whimpered as I passed, the source of the whimpering noise I heard when I first came in.

Bass had removed the woman’s fingers and feet; a chain running through her rib cage attached her to the wall.  No eyelids, ears or tongue; her eyes didn’t see and she made no sound because Bass had removed her vocal cords.  This victim was the first anomaly, as our leader and teacher, Keaton, reserved her darker tortures for men, primarily rapists and wife abusers, and had passed her prejudices along to the rest of us.

Small burn marks, as from a cigarette, covered the second man, a geometrical pattern over his entire body.  His eyes opened when I passed.  “Kill me,” he said.  “Please, kill me.”  Bass moved to go to him, to punish him for his speech.  I glanced at her and she stopped moving.

I ignored the pleading man and examined the rest of her large torture chamber, the source of the downwind stench of Bass’s lair.  Human pain and suffering lived here, shacking up with death and corruption, and they had given birth to the terror and insanity twins.  Her chem lab, where she produced her torture chemicals, lined one wall.  Another set of shelving contained her instruments of torture: chains, whips, wires, surgical instruments, picks, probes, nutcrackers, saws and clubs.  Cigarettes and soldering irons.  Blowtorches and electrical probes.  Hand-cranked generators, barbed wire, fishhooks.  All the equipment of the modern torturer.  The next shelf unit over held the medieval instruments, the thumbscrews, branding irons and other unfamiliar mechanical devices.  Tables and racks and chairs with hooks and rings covered the center of Bass’s torture chamber, fighting for space with blood encrusted buckets.  Blood had soaked into the floor and ceiling and stained them uniformly black.

Trophies covered the shelves on the far wall, some rotting in the dry air, others preserved in formaldehyde.  Brains, eyes, tongues, genitals, breasts, lips, hearts, livers – hell, an entire collection of human parts.  Transform parts.  Monster parts.  Animal parts.  She had them all.

The beast inside me began to respond to this.  My inner darkness liked death and suffering, and as I grew used to the industrial scale of the place, Bass’s lair began to arouse me, twisting me, stirring my eagerness for cruelty. I felt the heat on my face as my body responded.  I wanted to revel in this orgy of suffering.

When I became The Commander years ago, when I got political, when I decided I liked having people love me as well as fear me, I had shoved my darker Arm urges deep into the depths of my mind.  Those urges had never left me, though.

Bass relaxed as she caught the scent of my body.  She knew of my secret pleasures, pleasures taken only from the Transforms’ enemies these days.  She echoed my arousal with her own, visions of Angry Arm chased from her mind by fantasies of the two of us engaged in industrial-scale torture.

If I gave myself to madness, to pleasure, if I abandoned my responsibilities and my people, this is the path I would take.  The dark road called to me.  Bass’s lair, or something similar, would be my daily reward.

“This is magnificent, ma’am,” Bass said, intense and seductive.  “This is our natural right.  There’s no reason to deny ourselves, and we have a right to the pain of our prey.  We stunt ourselves when we deny our urges.  This is what we’re
made
for.  In time, all humanity will live in terror of us.  Think of it, ma’am!  All we need do is claim the power and teach our peers the ways of true pleasure.”

I ignored her ideology of torture, shoving away my own desires to rid myself of my touchy dealings with the other Major Transforms and normals.  Nor did I kill Bass for the implicit challenge buried in her attempted seduction.  Instead, I left the torture chamber, went upstairs and walked over to her equipment shed.  I needed to understand the full nature of her cruelty.

Bass stored five more people in the equipment shed, along with the body of one more, recently dead.  The small shed was closed and dark and very hot.  She kept her victims chained to a single support post, with no sanitation and not enough food or water.  The people had fought each other in their desperation.

Bass had lined the shed in human skin.

She still regaled me, uneasy now, with the glories of her cruelty.  She thought my arousal meant approval, but now she began to fear I wasn’t so easy to seduce.

The barn contained Bass’s exercise equipment, as well as four more people, the maimed and the dying, trapped in a place of slow and agonizing death.  One woman, her orifices sewn closed, writhed in madness.  Another man lay still, his right leg black and swollen with gangrene.  Another man had small straws sewn into his body, openings through which filth seeped both ways.  The fourth person, raisin-wrinkled and sexless, reeked of poison and shivered with an uncontrolled twitching.  Bass prattled on about organ transplants and the pain of organ rejection, and how much worse the process became when the organ donor was an animal.  How one tortured using diseases.  How one broke minds with sound, chemicals, darkness, and disorientation.  How pain turned any victim into an animal.  “It’s not about right or wrong, ma’am,” she said.  “It’s about power, who has it and who doesn’t.”

I tuned her out when I finally scented the true heart of the disquiet I felt when I first approached the place.  In the barn’s attic.

Children.

The last of my arousal fled.  Bass noticed my interest in the barn’s attic, but made no comment or defense of the horrors that most assuredly lived there.

I left the barn and stalked back to the house.  Bass resumed her presentation, but I no longer listened.  The world around me shrank to tiny pinpoints, at the focus of my gaze.  I judged, my judgment final and harsh.  In her kitchen, I turned to Bass and loosed the predator within.  She flinched, not understanding my move from arousal to anger.  I beat her until she no longer flinched.

“Three choices,” I said, many minutes later.  Rivulets of Bass’s blood spun lazy streams across the dusty floor.  I had offered these choices before, but never so harshly.  “Realize the error of your ways and I will end you, cleanly.  Deny the error of your ways and I will do to you what you have done to your victims, pack you in a shipping crate and airmail you to Romania, where you can survive or die as you see fit.  Or you can realize the error of your ways
and
seek restitution, in which case I will tag you and you will be mine.”

Bass shrunk away from me.  “Please,” she said, shivering, leaking terror.  “The tag.  Show me your way and I’ll follow.”

“Very well.”  I took her tag, a foul and seductive thing sitting in my mind and screaming of madness.  I inhaled, disgusted, as no tag I had ever taken affected me this way.  Still, this was my tag on her, and now I
owned
her.

The warmth of victory spread out, deep inside her, as from a chancy but well-played game.  I didn’t understand her madness; she had lost here, today, and decisively.  Disgusted, I turned away, planning on how to fix Bass’s broken and addled mind.

“No more torture chambers and research projects on pain,” I said.  “Find a different way.  Use what you’ve learned, certainly; but find something to
help
us.  To this end, you’ll call me every week, and visit my place in Detroit once every month.”  I paused, and she nodded.  Had she wanted someone to stop her?  Perhaps we all did, I thought, reading into her actions my struggles with my own beast.  “We need to save your people who are salvageable, and put the rest out of their misery.”  I paused, grabbed her tag, and burned juice into my predator effect.  “First, we’re going to talk.”  Bass peed herself and barely kept herself conscious.

I had missed something important here, and knew I had.  No matter how deep I scraped Bass’s mind, though, I wasn’t able to find what I had missed, or why she considered this a victory, other than the obvious conclusion that under my control she would no longer be an addict.  In the end, I walked away in frustration.

---

I made the approach in the early AM, sated after a fresh kill and after-kill sex, all in a vain attempt to wash the foul taste of Bass’s tag out of my mind.  Gail’s house guards were, as expected, no problem.  The light in Gail’s room clicked on just after I got within her metasense range, though.

Both Gail and Van sat up in bed, staring at the window where I entered, Van more bleary than Gail.  I damped down my annoyance, given how my metapresence masking tricks were supposed to be able to fool anyone this side of a Crow Guru.

“Teacher?” Gail said.

“You’ve seen Arm dominance contests.”  At least one; she had been part of Keaton’s retinue when Haggerty last challenged her.  Gail nodded.  “Among Arms, your ultimatum note is an invitation to a dominance contest.”

Gail frowned, an ‘oh, rats’ frown instead of a ‘oh fuck I am dead’ frown.  I raised an eyebrow.  “Does that mean we’re going to have to fight for real?”  I didn’t respond.  “If we fight for real, do I get to use Focus tricks?”  Focus tricks which terrified her to even think of using on an ally.

Hank had been right.  Gail’s mousy ‘I am a nothing pointless Focus’ persona was mostly an act.

I leapt from the window to the edge of their bed, looming over them.  “Not if you apologize and retract the note.”

At which point the absurdly unexpected happened: Van cleared his throat, Gail reached over to her thrift-shop nightstand, plucked a ten dollar bill from the drawer and gave the ten to Van.  Oh.

“How do I state what I said in my note in ‘Arm’ without triggering a dominance fight?” Gail said.

I flickered my eyes at Van, who didn’t catch my signal.  I made the signal more slowly and more explicitly.  Van’s eyes lit up.  “You grovel,” Van said, turning to Gail.  “Don’t make eye contact.  State your case.  Baring one’s throat while laying your foot on one of the Arm’s boots is traditional.”

Gail frowned, and her mental ‘I am so not doing that’ signal came through strong enough for Van to read.

Focuses.  None of them understood the power of groveling.  Groveling not only made an Arm pay attention, it obligated the dominant Arm to play nice, or at least nicer, with the groveler.

I pulled on Gail’s tag to distract her, hopped into their bed and nestled myself between them.  “I’m willing to cut Focuses a little slack on the subject,” I said.  “Why don’t you tell me the reasons behind your note.”  The last I said, breathlessly, into Gail’s ear.  She attempted to wiggle away, but I didn’t let her.