Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (34 page)

The FBI was using me to teach them what an Arm could do.  I fought back by screwing up their tests as best I could whenever I could hold in my rage.  More, though, I used the FBI to teach me about myself.

An Arm had to be some kind of athlete.  I’d seen women athletes perform in the various Olympic Games, and although I hadn’t thought much of their career choices, I’d come to grips with the fact that Transform Sickness didn’t do much in the way of asking permission.  If I lived and got out of here, I expected Keaton would put me through athletic training far worse than she put me through as Larry Borton.

I found ‘Arm as athlete’ a far better answer to ‘What is an Arm?’ than ‘killer’.  Perhaps God made the Arms to be bodyguards for the leading Focuses or something.  The answer didn’t satisfy me, but I liked it better than my earlier answers.

After the Marine had finished with me, and I lay on the ground staring up at the clear November sky and bleeding, McIntyre came up to me to sneer.  “Loser, you might as well pack it in and let the center use your room for what it was intended.  What Santa is giving me this year is a chance to piss on your grave, you grotesque parody of a human woman.”  He stuck his head down close to mine.  “Given your recent fine cooperation, though, I’d rather you died cleanly than give the Director here a reason to jack off.”

I agreed, but again my instincts counseled against answering McIntyre, so I said nothing.

The next morning, Doris met my eyes and cleared her throat as she delivered breakfast.  Under the oatmeal bowl I found a Xerox of a part of the first page of a government document, regarding the financials for the ‘Arm Carol Hancock Project’.  The salient information was near the top: ‘Project Termination Date: 12/21/1966’. 

A deadline, by more than one meaning of the word.

Handwritten in smeared pencil was the following: ‘You’ve got to get out of here!  What more can we do to help?’

I had a list.  I wrote down a few pieces of information I needed on the back of the note during my exercise session in the morning, and returned it at lunchtime.

For now, I had to wait on Keaton.  I hoped she decided I was worth saving.

Gilgamesh: November 5, 1966

Gilgamesh rolled off the freight train at about three in the morning.  He expected to metasense Crows in number, but sensed nothing.  Not even any dross.  The town was lit up around him against the low clouds and the rain had stopped, but the ground was still damp from earlier.  He slipped into the shadows and headed in towards town.  Rumor had said to go east to Kingston, and Gilgamesh had sometimes wondered the wisdom of his decision, but truthfully, he didn’t have anywhere better to go.

“Over here,” a voice whispered.  Gilgamesh jumped and skittered behind the back of an Esso station.  Nothing from his metasense.  No idea where the voice came from.

“In the car.”

Gilgamesh carefully looked around the area and found the car in question, lights off, chugging quietly in the night about five hundred feet away from the gas station.  The car was practically invisible in the shadow of the racks of pipe in the storage depot by the road.  Gilgamesh, even though he knew where the man in the car was, still couldn’t metasense him.

The man wanted Gilgamesh to join him in the car.  The idea terrified Gilgamesh.

“I don’t do cars,” Gilgamesh said, an answering whisper.

“You don’t do cars?”  His whisper voice echoed oddly against the ranks of bulk freight ready for transfer on to the trains.  “You’re in danger here.  This place is too open.”  Okay, he was a Crow.  No one else would have heard Gilgamesh’s whisper from so far away.

Well, there’s always a first time, Gilgamesh decided.  He jogged over to the car, past pipes, coal, and crates of what he suspected were household appliances.  Dogs guarded this particular lot, but they ignored Gilgamesh.  He approached within twenty feet of the car and slowed.  Cold sweat covered his body and his knees grew weaker with each step.  Three steps farther and he stopped.  He couldn’t force himself any closer to the car.  “Sorry,” Gilgamesh said, bracing himself against a chain link fence.

For a moment, the Crow in the car looked at Gilgamesh with wide eyes.  He nodded and exited out of the car.  “I can protect you if you can stand being close to me.”  The car was the only vehicle on the desolate industrial street.  The other Crow huddled close to the fence, as if it would shelter him.

“Protect me from what?”  Twenty feet was such a small distance.  Gilgamesh wondered if he should have come so close.  At least the clouds hid the moon, giving the night a comforting darkness.

“We have a Beast Man in the area,” the Crow said.  He was an inch shorter than Gilgamesh, slightly stouter, with short-cropped black hair and dark eyes.  He looked black Irish or Welch, and so confident while standing on the cracked sidewalk.  “I’m protected from the Beast Man’s metasense, but you’re not.  You’re Gilgamesh, right?  I can protect you if you walk with me.”

“Yes, I’m Gilgamesh,” Gilgamesh said, and walked over to the Crow.  Given a choice between an unknown Crow and the threat of a Beast Man?  No contest.  He would chance the unknown Crow.

At least this unknown Crow, unlike his car, didn’t feel like a threat.

“I’m Vizul Lightning,” the Crow said, as Gilgamesh came close.  “Guru Thomas and the rest of them are about five miles away.  We can walk.”

“Okay,” Gilgamesh said, wondering if Vizul meant the same thing Echo had when he called his boss a ‘Guru’.  Disquieting, but certainly more interesting than Gilgamesh’s first guess that ‘Guru’ was Echo’s boss’s first name.  “So you’ve seen a Beast Man?”

“Me?  You’ve got to be kidding.  I’m just here to help Occum,” the Crow said.  Gilgamesh metasensed the same sort of roiling cloud of foggy dross on the Crow that had covered Echo back in St. Louis.  No hint of
fierce
, though.  “None of us have seen or metasensed this beast yet, but reliable reports have him in the general area.  Hunting the Catskills, it seems.”

Gilgamesh licked his lips and relaxed.  “Uh, aren’t the Catskills miles away from here?”

“The last report had the Beast hunting near Indian Head Mountain, about five miles north of Woodstock, which is itself about five miles from here,” Vizul said, and pointed off to the northwest.  “We’re all in grave danger.”

Ten miles didn’t seem particularly close to Gilgamesh, certainly not close enough to be termed ‘grave danger’.  On the other hand, Gilgamesh knew Arms, not Beast Men, and as Beast Men were supposedly able to metasense Crows… 

Gilgamesh found his metasense focused to the northwest.  Presumably, Beast Men were as dangerous as the rumors said.  “So why are all these Crows gathered here?” Gilgamesh asked.  The last place he would choose to gather was a town right next to a Beast Man.

“Occum thinks he can tame the Beast Man, if he can get close.”

Gilgamesh stopped his sudden panicked run after a half dozen steps.  He didn’t remember starting to run; his feet had taken off on their own.  Vizul stopped and waited for Gilgamesh to come back.  “Taming a Beast sounds suicidal,” Gilgamesh said, sheepishly.  He guessed Occum was another Crow.

“Hey, you’re not going to get any arguments from me.  But Occum’s a beast tamer; he’s tamed just about everything up to and including Monsters.  In fact, Occum has a bright idea that Beast Men ought to be easier to tame than Monsters.  If you can believe Occum, he wants to use tamed Beast Men to help him tame Monsters.”

“If Beast Men are anything like Arms, I don’t think ‘taming’ is the right attitude,” Gilgamesh said.  “From what I’ve observed, Zaltu – Stacy Keaton – is the sort who will try and tame
you
.”

Now Vizul ran.  Gilgamesh found it easy to keep up with Vizul.  The other Crow wasn’t much of a runner, sedentary and citified, perhaps, at least for a Crow.

At least they would get to wherever they were going faster this way.

Vizul led him to a vacant farmhouse at the base of the hills that marked the edge of the Hudson River valley.  They had to dart over two freeways to get to the farmhouse, nicely situated about a mile and a half from the nearest freeway and far from any concentrations of people.  Vizul and Gilgamesh trooped through hundreds of yards of harvested cornfields, peppered only with pale brown stalks left over from the harvest.  Closer to the house, there were apple and pear trees, and even a cluster of blueberry bushes.  Gilgamesh followed Vizul around the bushes and found a man and a woman chatting on the back porch steps.  The woman stroked a small tiger striped cat who purred happily in her lap.  A Coleman lantern on the railing provided light.  They metasensed as normals and Gilgamesh held back, wondering why Vizul would lead him here.  Then Gilgamesh noticed, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get a good view of the man’s face.  Gilgamesh saw him, but his features refused to stick in Gilgamesh’s memory.  Now that was an interesting trick. 

The man had to be a Crow.

“Hello,” Gilgamesh said.  The man and the woman looked up at him.  Gilgamesh resisted the urge to step backwards.

“Vizul, could you grab the camp stool for our new friend, please?” the man asked, and motioned to Gilgamesh.  “I’m Thomas the Dreamer.”

“Gilgamesh.”

The woman waved.  She was on the stout side, in her early thirties, with shoulder length light brown hair held back from her face by artlessly placed bobby pins.  For a moment, Gilgamesh wondered why she seemed so plain, and realized she wasn’t wearing makeup.  Noting her calf-length, red-checked A-line dress, he decided she was one of those artsy loose women who hung around with Beatniks.  “Sadie,” she said.

Vizul disappeared into the house with a confident bang of a screen door; re-appeared with the aforementioned stool, sat it down about five feet away from Thomas, and vanished back into the farmhouse.  The sky was no longer black, showing the first hints of sunrise in the east.  It would be a cool, crisp day.  Beautiful.  The cat left the woman to investigate Gilgamesh.  He must have approved, as he proceeded to wind his way between Gilgamesh’s legs.  Gilgamesh did his best to ignore the cat.

“Sir, what’s the smell?” Gilgamesh asked.  “And the snoring?”  Someone in the house was snoring thunderously.  “Have you captured the Beast Man already?”  If so, Gilgamesh was about to see how fast he could run.

“Oh, that’s Brunhilda,” Sadie whispered.  “She’s Occum’s latest Monster.”  Sadie’s voice was expressive and powerful, even as a whisper.  Gilgamesh pegged her as a singer of some variety.  He wondered how she had gotten involved with this group of Crows.  He doubted she was a local; she spoke with a noticeable Long Island accent and knew to whisper around Crows.

Gilgamesh gingerly sat on the stool, nervous to be so near to a Monster.  And a woman.  Well, if this Thomas Crow wasn’t panicked, he didn’t need to be, either.

“Rumor sent me,” Gilgamesh said, to Thomas.  “He said you’d want to hear my story.  I found his suggestions hard to resist.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Thomas said.  “That’s our Rumor.  Is it true you transformed only four months ago?”

“Three and a half,” Gilgamesh said.  “Is that a problem?”

“No.  Not at all,” Thomas said.  Suddenly, little blue robin’s eggs appeared, a lot of them, floating all around Gilgamesh.  They vanished.  Gilgamesh jumped up, stopped and sat back down.  The cat, offended, skittered a few steps away, and sat on its haunches to watch the fun.  “How many did you metasense?” Thomas asked.

Gilgamesh furrowed his brow when he realized he hadn’t seen the eggs, and had only noticed them with his metasense.  He hadn’t known Crows could create illusions or that his metasense could sense lifelike images.  “I don’t know, sir,” Gilgamesh said.  “I lost track at fifty-eight.”

Thomas the Dreamer nodded, and someone softly whistled from inside the cabin.  “Okay, how about this?” Thomas said.  A dozen more eggs appeared on the ground at Gilgamesh’s feet.  “How many of these can you move at once?”

“Move?” Gilgamesh asked.  Thomas nodded, and Gilgamesh took a closer look.  Each egg was indeed its own thing of dross, separate from the others.  Gilgamesh had never tried to move dross before, save when he fed.  He tried to move one to the side.  Nothing.  He tried two.  Still nothing.  He tried to move them all.  Nada.  He shook his head, focused on one of the eggs, and bent his will and his capability to gather dross into the ability to move it.

The egg moved toward Gilgamesh and vanished.  He
had taken it as dross.  “Sorry, sir,” Gilgamesh said.

“That’s okay.  Next, can you command Sheila, here?” Thomas asked, and pointed to the cat.

“Command?”  The question sounded absurd, but Vizul had mentioned that Occum could tame animals.  Gilgamesh didn’t know where to start.  He tried mental commands, but the cat simply sat.  “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re even talking about.”

“No need to apologize.  I was just testing you to find out what sort of skills you have.  All us Crows are a little different in what we can do,” Thomas said.  It took all Gilgamesh’s will not to run.  Thomas the Dreamer was friendly and kind, as advertised, but he was still terrifying to be anywhere near.  He knew so much!  “So, why don’t you tell us why Rumor sent you to me?”

“While I was living in St. Louis, taking dross from Tiamat – the Carol Hancock Arm, who’s confined in the Detention Center in St. Louis – a Crow by the name of Echo came by and told me I was interfering in other Crow’s business by taking dross from the Detention Center.  Echo, who later represented himself as working for a senior Crow named Guru Chevalier, said that ‘all Arms died’ and if the Carol Hancock Arm escaped, he would betray her to the authorities, and threatened to help the police hunt this Arm down.”