Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (32 page)

Midgard shook his head and picked up a piece of the stale bread they had looted from some trashcans behind a diner.  He leaned back against the curving concrete and gnawed halfheartedly.  “About the only thing going for this place is that my bad dreams have stopped.”  Midgard had complained about bad dreams in St. Louis, and when Gilgamesh had asked about them, Midgard had said that Gilgamesh would get them too, when he got older.  “Minton’s no worse off than any of us are.”

Gilgamesh paused and tried to find a more comfortable position in the cold culvert.  As he moved the garbage, a car rumbled by overhead and the wooden crates shivered.  “What’s happening to the Minton Focus has no reason.  She’s not a killer.  Her problem is that she’s too nice a person.”

“You want to save her, don’t you?” Midgard asked.  He polished off the last bite of bread and brushed the crumbs from his pants.

“Yes, of course, but I don’t see how.”

Midgard chuckled.  “We’re living in a culvert under a road, and you want to save this Minton Focus, and Tiamat, and on the side find a way to chastise Echo for chasing us out of St. Louis?  You’re too nice a person yourself, Gilgamesh.  We’re Crows, dammit!  We’re going to be lucky if we can find a way to keep ourselves alive.”

They had hashed this out before and gotten nowhere.  It was hard enough for Gilgamesh to be in close contact even with another Crow for so long.  Minton’s pain made it unbearable.  “I’m bored,” Gilgamesh said.  “At least St. Louis was interesting, trying to figure out Tiamat and Zaltu.  Watching a bunch of nasty old adult Transforms torture a kid Focus is nothing but horrible.”

“Crows don’t like things interesting,” Midgard said.  “However, if you want life to be interesting, head east.  Many Crows live along the east coast, and bumping heads with them ought to keep you from being bored for quite a while.  I might head there myself, but first, I want to check out Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo.”

Gilgamesh shrugged.  “Good luck,” he said.  “I’ll stick around here until I’ve grabbed the last of the dross from Zaltu’s kills

“Good luck, yourself,” Midgard said. 

Gilgamesh nodded.  After Midgard left, Gilgamesh walked south until he was out of range of Miss Minton, and found a condemned tenement where he could squat.  Alone again.  He thought dark thoughts about the lives of Crows.  The lives of all Transforms.  Why everything was so bad.

He wasn’t able to come up with any answers.

Carol Hancock: November 1, 1966 – November 3, 1966

I exercised all morning after McIntyre’s second target practice session.  It took an effort of will, because what I preferred to do was curl up in my bed and wallow in the misery of my descending juice count.  The ache in my muscles prodded me into motion anyway.  With ‘Larry Borton’ gone, my muscles deteriorated faster.

Nurse Wilson snuck me extra food and I smelled Doris’s scent on her.  My friends were cooperating.  Of all things, the extra food routine appeared to be part of the low-end staff’s established clandestine procedures.  With a little thought, I decided Focuses must need extra food as well.

After lunch, McIntyre’s goons led me out into the courtyard again.  I expected another target shooting session, but instead, McIntyre stood next to a tank of water.  The tank was slightly larger than a coffin and about four feet tall.  Slow raindrops plinked on its surface.  “Chain her up and drop her in,” he said.

For an instant, I thought they had come up with a novel way of killing me.  Then I took a good look at McIntyre and his techs, and realized they all thought I would survive this.  They tossed me in and I tried to hold my breath.  That worked for a while.  After I coughed out the air in my lungs, I didn’t pass out as I’d expected I would.  I bounced on the bottom, chained and immobile, and breathed water.  Many minutes passed, and I went to sleep.  Dreams and everything.  I have no idea how long they held me under – over an hour, my guess – but the next thing I knew, I was awake and spitting out water.  Apparently, breathing wasn’t as essential as it had once been.  I wondered how that worked and cursed the fact I hadn’t had a science class since high school biology.

They hauled me into Lab One, and the techs started their work.  I shivered, soaking wet and too low on juice to resist the cold.  Six days had passed since my last draw, normally not a problem, but their tests cost me juice, the water test the most. 

McIntyre proved to be chatty as the techs took post-test measurements and samples.  My urine was the most obscene bright yellow I’d ever seen.  “You know, Carol, it’s too bad no one can trust Arms, because of what that bitch Keaton did when she turned on us.  You’d make a hell of an FBI agent.”  He leered, and my skin crawled.  “As it is, we’re going to keep going today, even though
Dr. Peterson says your juice levels are dangerously low.  I even have some incentive for you – you’re going to get a draw tonight.  My people got lucky and found a man about to go into withdrawal at a suburban St. Louis Transform Clinic, and you get to keep this incipient psycho from dying in withdrawal.”

Again, I refused to answer.  My instincts on the subject had served me right before and I let them guide me again.  The last thing I wanted was to encourage McIntyre or befriend him. 

McIntyre’s next test involved a rigged gurney.  They attached me to it, wheeled it out onto the Detention Center roof, and dropped me three stories down onto concrete.  I strained a few muscles and tendons when I landed on my toes, but didn’t break a single bone.  I was so shocked that, without thinking, I stood up.

Mistake.  I shouldn’t have stood up.  Low juice made me stupid.  Both
Dr. Peterson and the FBI goons were so surprised they repeated the test a half hour later.  This time, I writhed on the ground in agony afterwards, all a show, to convince them the result of the first test was a fluke. 

I was glad of that test, though.  Now I knew how I would escape from this damned place, if the time ever came: through the unbarred third story window in the bathroom I used, three doors down from the suicide cell.  Before the test, I had decided it was too high to be useful.  In addition, by taking me up onto the roof, they gave me a bird’s eye view of the Detention Center and its surroundings, improving my map of the Detention Center.

My preparations for a possible escape progressed on other fronts as well.  Mike Artusy and I had a routine going, where I took a late shower, and he was always available to escort me from the suicide cell to the bathroom.  He got to feel me up and I got to encourage him.  Low on juice, I could hardly stand to have him touch me, but necessity made me a good actress.  My purpose was to provide him incentive to find a way to remove the two guards from outside the suicide cell so he could get laid again.  He might not be able to pull it off, but I had many long shots percolating, and I only needed one to come through. 

Now, because I’d learned I could walk away from a three story fall, I had other uses planned for my late night shower routine.

Patrelle’s sadistic plans for the day weren’t finished.  Yes, I sensed my next draw, another volunteer Transform, come into the Detention Center, but they took him out into the courtyard.  Like an obedient puppy, they led me on a leash to the courtyard, where I found my draw guarded by four starving attack dogs, German Shepherds.

I crouched down and studied the situation.  I wasn’t anywhere near as advanced as that Rose Desmond Arm that
Dr. Zielinski had told me about, who could slow down her draws, but I wasn’t a mindless juice-hungry zombie in front of a draw anymore.  That is, I didn’t attack the German Shepherds with my teeth and chipped-painted fingernails.

Instead, I let my instincts guide me.  I growled the dogs into whining submission before I took the Transform. 

I awoke back in the suicide cell.  I amused myself as normal until, to my surprise, I got a knock on the door.  My watch, which I still couldn’t believe they hadn’t taken from me, said it was time for my late night shower.  Artusy.

I did him in the corridor.  Now, I wanted him to touch me.  We clung to each other, all hot hands and desperate post-draw urgency.  To my shock, there was only one guard and he didn’t interfere.  “That’s ‘cause she couldn’t get the dog,” the guard said.  “You shoulda seen her.  Stoned off her ass, an’ she’s tryin’ to make it with a fuckin’ dog, only the dog wouldn’t have her.  McIntyre and his guys laughed so hard they were rollin’ on the ground.”

Someday, McIntyre would die for his laughter. 

I didn’t disappoint Mike Artusy.  I figured twenty minutes would satisfy him beyond his wildest dreams and wouldn’t drive him to flee in terror.  I’d even gained sufficient self-control that I didn’t make a pass at the leering guard, to my surprise.

The shower afterwards was abnormally long, though, and Artusy had to pound on the door to get me to finish after my allotted fifteen minutes.

The next day, they set up movie cameras and gave me a death row inmate to play with.  He survived the experience.  I probably would have gotten the clap or syphilis, save that as an Arm I was immune to nearly any imaginable communicable disease.  I wasn’t anywhere near as kind to him as I’d been to Mike Artusy.

After I fucked the diseased rapist-murderer into gibbering insanity, I realized I had changed my outlook on life since the shadowy Patrelle’s arrival.  To hell with my reluctance to sink to the level of my enemies.  I’d go lower.  I wanted revenge.  Blood-soaked revenge.

Rover (Interlude): November 1, 1966

What was with these hunters!  He hadn’t even chased any cars since the last time they hunted him, or killed anyone.  At least that he remembered.  He stayed up in the mountains, avoiding humans altogether.

Rover panted and crept through the underbrush to the overlook to watch them.  In his mind, he cursed them as carrion.

They pushed a cage into a clearing, a cage with a wounded and dying Monster in it, a Monster shot full of big holes.  Luckily, Rover got some good loving a paw’s worth of days ago.  The hunters carried different thunder sticks
this time, shorter and wider.  He tried to understand, but couldn’t.

He had made a mistake after the last good loving.  He saw something in himself he hadn’t seen before.  A possibility.  He tried something, after the good loving.

It worked, making his teeth sharper and longer.  Sort of.  He hadn’t been able to make his existing teeth grow sharper and longer.  Instead, he grew a new set of teeth that had forced out his old teeth.  In the process, he lost things.  Memories.  Words.  Like the real name of the thunder sticks.  He had lost a bit of his humanity.

“I’m Rover,” he whispered.  A dog, a large dog.  Only he was back to ‘robber’.  He had to remember not to try the trick with the teeth.  He didn’t have much more humanity to lose.

They put boxes around the Monster’s cage.  Rover shook his head.  Traps of some sort, he decided.  Nets.  They wanted to capture him, not kill him.

Why?

“Go ‘way,” Rover barked down at the hunters.  The not-a-Monster lady with the huge amount of good loving, who was tiny, about the same size as the little girl who named him Rover, looked up at him and met his gaze.  Rover slunk back.  He hadn’t realized she could see him from so far away.

“Rover, we’re here to help you,” she said.  Her voice was loud but beautiful, matching her personal beauty.  He could almost believe her words, but not quite.  She terrified him.

“Monster trap,” he said.

He fled.  They were too dangerous, and too precious.  If he stayed with them, he would eventually need the good loving, and either he would kill them or they would kill him.

Tonya Biggioni: November 2, 1966

“Biggioni.”

“Tonya, this is Lori.”

“How did you get this number?  My television station office’s phone number is a secret.”

“Focus tricks.  Trust me, Tonya, you don’t want to know.”

“So, what’s the occasion?  You finally take care of the Catskills Monster?”

“No.  Something else came up.”

“Are you trying to get yourself in trouble?  Taking care of the Monster is priority number one, and…”

“The Catskills Monster isn’t a Monster.  He’s a male Major Transform, what’s called a Chimera.  The male version of an Arm.”

“You’re crazy.  I don’t care what this creature is as long as this creature dies.”

“Tonya, he’s got a name: Rover.  He
talks
.  He’s as much of a Major Transform as either of us is.  It would be wrong to kill him; he’s not a mindless beast.  Tonya, we need a plan to take care of him that doesn’t involve killing.  I don’t think any of us should be in the business of killing Major Transforms of any variety.  The consequences of killing Major Transforms might spiral out…”

“Kill the Monster.  Without the excuses.”

“Tonya, look, I convinced a Crow who tames animals and Monsters to try and tame Rover.  Bring him into civilization; give him another alternative other than killing innocents.  I’m gambling, here, but I think we need to give…”

“Lori, Crows don’t exist.  Chimeras don’t exist.  Male Major Transforms don’t exist.  You can’t…”

“The fact the Council, in its infinite wisdom, refuses to condescend to admit they really exist isn’t going to change the reality that they
do
exist and the Council’s refusal to recognize the existence of the male Major Transforms is going to bite them in the derrière some dark day soon, if not tomorrow and Rover is most definitely male and there’s no mistaking his sex.  His manhood is as long as my forearm!”