In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (31 page)

“Monsters!  Male Arms!  They’re after us!”

“You’ve been attacked?”  This didn’t seem likely.  Gwen remained quite alive, as were all her people, many of whom should have been at work.  Gwen and her household would have a hard time stopping a rogue Boy Scout.  A blind rogue Boy Scout.

“Two of them.  Big as houses.  Scary things, giant bears with pricks as long as…”  Gwen’s voice tailed off, her face turning red.  Gwen was a bottom end Focus, barely in control of her own people, who she panicked into doing silly things on a regular basis.  “We all saw them, roaming around the edge of my place!”

Tonya winced.  Saw them, not metasensed them.  No Chimeras would do anything so stupid as to show themselves without actually attacking.

This had to be another in the recent series of harassment attacks that had started with Hancock’s tossing her gift surplus male Transform at the baby Houston Focus.  This one even sounded like something Hancock could arrange, unlike the metasense ‘hole’ that devoured Tonya’s kitchen last week, the three ridiculous zoning lawsuits that showed up on Monday, and Wednesday’s all-day telephone outage the phone company called a ‘bureaucratic error’.

Hancock couldn’t be so stupid as to think this harassment campaign would work.  With a little bit of…

“Please, Tonya, save us!” Gwen got down on her knees, grabbed at Tonya, and said the magic words.  “I’ll do anything!”

Tonya took a deep breath.  This little problem would eat up her entire day.  She would get back to taking down Hancock tomorrow.

Enkidu: November 12, 1968

“I don’t understand any of this,” Hoffman said.  His voice was a modulated growl because he was in his beast form, the blocky black-furred bear with a crocodile’s snout.  “Why here?  Why now?  Why us?”

“Delilah, Joshua’s Pack Mistress, can pick up on many things in her Dreams.  Here, now, is where we must be,” Enkidu said.  He wore his newest model beast form, a pony sized piebald wolf with oversized teeth and retractable scimitar claws.  They waited in a factory yard near the East-West Toll Road’s Broadway exit in Gary, Indiana, as rain mixed with snow pelted them and kept them cool.  A perfect day for a fight.  In weather like this, Enkidu wouldn’t have to hold back at all.  “As to the latter?  Odin and his pack are on alert, but Odin’s in his half-beast form so he can use heavy weapons if he needs to.  So it falls to us to attempt the intercept.”  Even in his beast form, Enkidu’s voice was fully human, one of the things of which he was most proud.

“What, can this Pack Mistress thing predict the future?”  Hoffman paced restlessly beside the empty racks made to hold rebar in better times.

“No.  She can pick up on plans, though.  Whoever or whatever this new threat is, they don’t know how to cover themselves in the Dreaming,” Enkidu said.  “Perhaps they don’t even know about the Dreaming.”

The logic bothered Enkidu as well, different logic at a different level.  Delilah said this was a new threat from what appeared to be a new form of Major Transform, supposedly emanating from the Focuses.  However, the Dreaming was a Focus trick; the Hunters’ version of it appeared in the daytime, in the clouds, while the Crow version, according to Urine, came on the wind.  The only logical explanation was some group of Focuses didn’t know the Dreaming tricks, implying that the Focuses were far more disunited and factional than Wandering Shade believed.  In addition, this meant the enemy came at them based on information collected in other ways, which meant successful espionage.  Which was also supposedly impossible…unless some Focus faction was helping these unknowns on the sly.

In either case, Wandering Shade’s grand strategy was flawed.  They should be picking off the Focuses based on opportunity, not waiting for some perfect moment to strike and crack their organizational resolve.  That wasn’t a new thought for Enkidu, not since he had learned that his Master was a crazy Crow.

Hoffman stopped his pacing and stood as tall as his bear form permitted.  “New implies weak, Hunter Enkidu,” he said.  “This is below you.”

“You want to claim this interception and gain a name?”

“Yes, Hunter.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid!  New meant unknown, and unknown meant problems, as with his contests with the Talking Arm.  However, the formality of Hoffman’s request shivered the Law.  Enkidu didn’t have any choice but to say: “Then this is yours.  May you gain your name.”

Wandering Shade, Odin, and the Judges had gone back and forth many times over the last year discussing how best to train young Hunters.  If young Hunters gained their names and independence too easily, they commonly got stupid and died soon after they went out on their own.  Enkidu, Joshua and Odin had all come close to dying in this period of their lives, saved only by the direct help of Wandering Shade.  Wandering Shade found himself spread too thin these days, though, for direct help; the Hunter’s cousins, the Mountain Men, and their endless internecine warfare took up too much of his time.  The Hunters needed to be able to expand without Wandering Shade’s personal help.

The solution was to make it difficult for young Hunters to gain their names.  Enkidu feared gaining names had become too difficult; only one had gained a name this year, Thunder.  Thunder had moved west, to the Rocky Mountains near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and although considered overly cautious by the rest of the Hunters, he appeared to be thriving.  The rest…well, there were setbacks.  Constant setbacks.

They waited in wet silence as the afternoon passed.  Workers labored in the factory, but the factory had shrunk since its heyday, and no one used this yard any longer.  The precipitation turned to snow and blew out, replaced by a cold northwest wind and a sky patchy with clouds and occasional short flurries of big-flaked snow.  Enkidu’s mind wandered in the silence.  He saw more dangers to Odin and his pack than these unknown enemies; familiar dangers.  The Talking Arm.  Gilgamesh.  A monstrous senior Crow, terrifying and chaotic.  That’s where he should be, facing those enemies, not here.  Orders were orders, though, and he stayed put.

He noticed a distant flicker from the east, which soon resolved itself into two Major Transforms, entities that glowed Focus or Crow strong, but vastly different than either.  “Hoffman.  They come,” Enkidu said.

“Where?”

Enkidu wanted to bury his teeth in Hoffman’s neck and shake him in frustration.  “East, dammit.  On the toll road.”

Hoffman paused in concentration for far too long.  “There they are,” Hoffman said.  “I must ready my pack.”

“Then do so,” Enkidu said.  Stupid Law formalities.  Hoffman left the yard with his pack, to the unused driveway where his Gals had parked his truck.  Enkidu followed.

The two enemies approached and exited the toll road, as Delilah predicted.  They drove a school bus labeled Flat Rock Community School District, and the bus carried more than the two unknowns – at least a dozen normal men.  Enkidu smelled weapons.

Bound by the Law, Enkidu couldn’t interfere with Hoffman, not even to shout out what he learned of the enemy.  Hoffman’s pack alpha, Elisa, drove their semi across Broadway, splashing through icy puddles and blocking the road.  Hoffman rumbled the Terror, sending the normals fleeing their cars and trucks on foot.

Now they were on the clock.  The police would be here within minutes.  The school bus stopped and a half dozen well-armed men stepped out into the cold, followed by two women, the unknown Major Transforms, one short and one tall.

Enkidu hissed.  Able to look at them, he realized instantly what they were: Focuses without households or household juice buffers.  Arm-Focuses.  Female fighting machines who carried themselves like Arms, with Arm-like muscles, but with less juice than the Arms carried with them.  They reeked of danger.

Hoffman strode forward.  “Go home, bitches,” he said.  “We don’t need to fight.”

“It speaks!” the tall one said.  Hmm.  The other side appeared to be as clueless as Hoffman.

“It’s a Hunter,” the short one said.  “He’s what we were trained to fight.  Take out his pack.”

Without further warning or surrender demands, the armed men opened fire on Hoffman’s pack Gals, or at least those in sight.  Four fell in the first volley.  The remaining normal bystanders screamed louder and ran faster.  Enkidu motioned for his pack to take cover and ready weapons; he circled to the left, flanking the bitches and their small army so he could charge from surprise when the expected happened and Hoffman fell.

This was such a waste.

The two Arm-Focuses readied weapons, two swords each, a long one and a short one.  They bumped elbows and a juice glow spread between them, what Enkidu metasensed as a low-end Focus trick.  Tricked up, they charged Hoffman.

Hoffman roared his Terror and charged the Arm-Focuses, right into their juice trick.  The Arm-Focus’s soldiers, now all out of the bus, showed impressive discipline, not panicking at the Terror, taking good cover behind the bus and abandoned vehicles, and not wasting their ammunition.  Vets, Enkidu realized.  The bitches had recruited Nam-vets for their army.  They weren’t fools; they knew what they were up against.

The two Arm-Focuses fought in unison, expertly dancing out of Hoffman’s way and slicing deep into the trainee Hunter’s body.  Hoffman pivoted and followed Enkidu’s dictum, lining up one of the Arm-Focuses in front of the other before he charged.  The tactic did the trick; the closer one, the tall Arm-Focus, cartwheeled away as he charged while the short one, a beat too slow, took the charge.  Bad for her; Hoffman’s massive right arm and dagger-clawed paw ripped the Arm-Focus in half, spraying her guts ten feet across the road and severing her backbone three vertebrae up from her hips.

The tall Arm-Focus stopped.  Quarterback-style, she tossed her short sword into Hoffman’s upper back.  He turned to find nothing, as the tall Arm-Focus had leapt up, over him.  She landed on one toe and decapitated Hoffman, ending the fight with ignominy and an élan explosion.  The fight between the vets and Hoffman’s pack sputtered to an end, as the unwounded pack Gals broke and ran.

“Sigrid!  In juice seven!” the tall one ordered, in code, crouching and searching.  Enkidu’s eyes widened in shock – the fallen Arm-Focus hadn’t died, despite her damage.

“Evac, evac!” the tall one said, after she completed her scan.  “Martin, gather up Sigrid and…”

Enkidu charged, quiet and intense.  He had their measure; he had the angle and the surprise.  Two of his long strides from the tall Arm-Focus she turned toward him and leapt to the side.  Enkidu’s momentum carried him into the normal soldiers and he roared his Terror, freezing their meat as he ripped, bit and bowled over eight of them, killing them all.  He knew what would happen next, so without even bothering to metasense he continued his move with a one-eighty doggy-roll and bit.

For his efforts he caught flesh, the upper arm of the tall Arm-Focus as she approached him; he shook and ripped the arm from her body as she sliced into his abdomen.  He growled Terror, freezing the Arm-Focus, then leapt for her throat.  She fell back, accepting his leap, but her good arm found one of the fallen soldier’s Monster guns, and she unloaded a round into his upper chest at point blank range.  The three-quarter inch bullet passed through him, taking with it parts of two ribs and some of his right lung.  The world dimmed for a moment as inside, his élan sloshed to cover the damage done.

“Fuck,” Enkidu said, shaking off the gunshot.  The tall Arm-Focus skittered away; as Enkidu watched she got hit one, two and then three times by his pack Gals, who had opened fire when he charged.  Cleo and the Monster-Gals unable to hold weapons charged in fast, met by two grenade explosions from the surviving vets.  One of the grenades shredded Enkidu’s lower back and dropped him again.

When he next stuck his head up, he saw the few surviving enemy troops driving away with both the two Arm-Focuses, all in a pickup truck commandeered from a normal.  The bus they came in on burned, crackling and reeking, and in the distance, Enkidu heard the expected sirens.  He got to his feet, one hand over his sliced-open guts, holding them in.  “Into the semi,” he ordered.  He knew where these bitches came from; he had smelled the foul stench of Detroit on them, past even the ambient industrial reek of Gary.  “Chase.”  He grabbed Hoffman’s body; Gwen already had Hoffman’s head.  “Hoff-pack!  Get the fuck over here now!” Enkidu said, in his loudest bellow, ignoring his pain.  Only three came, the rest either dead or fled.

He metasensed his own pack; no deaders, no fleders, just a few casualties he would have to heal.  He levered Hoffman’s body up into the back of the semi with one hand, grunting mightily as he did so.  “Meena, help me with this.  Mary, the cat-gut.”

Hoffman wasn’t dead, not really.  Sewing his head back on would allow him to heal, especially since Enkidu hadn’t made off with any of Hoffman’s spewed élan.  This was the benefit of having a trainee Hunter working with an established Hunter – the established Hunter and his pack could put fallen trainees back together.  Often they would have to start over, the trainee having lost all memories due to his near death, but not always.  The only certainty was that Hoffman hadn’t succeeded at his name test and that he wouldn’t be ready to try again for at least another few months.

“We’re following them?” Cleo said.  “They took us apart!”

That was worth a snort.  “They’re on the ropes, they both need major healing time,” Enkidu said, hungry for blood.  “I’ll be good as new within an hour.  The two bitches lost 14 of the 16 soldiers they started with.  And my blood’s up.”