Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (40 page)

The wall was brick, topped by concrete, about ten feet tall.  Certainly too tall for me to climb.  After I holstered Dr. Zielinski’s knife, I jumped anyway. 

My fingers caught the lip of concrete that overhung the brick and I began to pull myself up.  Pain! 

I dropped to the ground again.  Something sharp was on the top of the wall.

My fingers bled, cut along the length of them.  I wouldn’t be able to pull myself over doing this.  I needed another solution, and I needed it now.

What to do? 

I had the urge to sit down and cry.  Give up.  Not a thing in my escape had gone as I had planned.  The window wasn’t supposed to be so hard to open.  I wasn’t supposed to get stuck.  The shackles weren’t supposed to be so loud.  There wasn’t supposed to be something sharp on the top of the inner wall.

Quitter, quitter, quitter, the voices in my head whispered.  I closed my eyes and tried to stop shaking.  I had to move. 

I took stock and looked over at the guardhouse.  The guards were still engrossed with my pictures, but I couldn’t stand here all night, exposed.  I had to do something.

Hell.  I still had my bathrobe wrapped around my shackles.  I pulled it loose and wrapped one end of the robe around each hand, with about a foot of slack in the middle.  I jumped again.  Something dug into my hand through the heavy fabric of the robe, but I ignored the pain and pulled myself up.

The top of the wall was set with broken glass. 

I didn’t have time for this.  I took my right hand, reached over to the far side of the wall and held on, the bathrobe between my hands protecting my arm.  I pulled my other hand loose from the bathrobe.  Holding on with my right hand, I scrabbled up with my feet until the toes of my left foot gripped the wall.  Leaning to the side, right hand holding on to the far side of the wall, left foot holding on to the near side of the wall by my toes, I barely kept my balance.  I pulled my right leg up between my left leg and the wall and swung it over in a big motion.  This vaulted me over the wall and I fell to the dried grass on the other side.  I wrapped the bathrobe around my shackles and took off.

I got two steps.  “Well, lookie lookie what have we here,” a voice said, a low whisper.

McIntyre.

Gilgamesh: November 15, 1966

Echo had been creeping toward the Detention Center for hours.  He had started at dusk and still crept forward, a mile and a half to the north of the place. 

He hadn’t showed yesterday at all, day or night.  He must have spent the day working up his courage.

Gilgamesh checked his battered watch.  Nearly midnight, if the damned thing was accurate.  He thought things through, and decided to keep himself between Echo and the Detention Center.  He began to walk.

A couple of minutes later, Gilgamesh began to run.  He now knew where Echo headed – toward the hotel where Tiamat’s FBI torturers stayed, a mile and a quarter northwest of the Detention Center.

Echo started to run as well.

So much for Thomas the Dreamer’s protections he imagined had kept him hidden from Echo’s metasense.

Gilgamesh’s stomach churned as he ran.  This time, there would be a confrontation if he wanted to save Tiamat.

“So, you found some friends of your own who are willing to back you, eh?” Echo said.

“Thomas the Dreamer,” Gilgamesh replied.  Thomas had told him to mention his name.  The mention didn’t have the effect Gilgamesh had hoped for.

Echo didn’t run.

He and Echo stood on opposite ends of a parking lot of a small office building one block from the hotel the FBI used.  Discrete signs for dentists and pediatricians cluttered the tiny lawn.  The overcast sky blanketed the city, the air warmer than the last two nights.

“Thomas says it would be unwise for you to betray the Arm,” Gilgamesh said.  “Unwise and in violation of prior Crow agreements.”

With his metasense, he sensed Tiamat on the way to her evening shower. 

“Fools.  There are no Crow agreements on the subject of Monsters.  Monsters have no rights.”

“The Arms are Major Transforms, not Monsters,” Gilgamesh said. 

“Weak,” Echo said and started to walk across the parking lot.  “This argument is pointless.  I’d advise you to clear out.  I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t think you can,” Gilgamesh said.  This damned pile of dross on him had to be good for something.

Echo stopped and clapped his hands.  Dross moved out from him, a thin shell, and when it reached Gilgamesh, the dross pummeled him with loud noises.

Loud echoing noises.  Deep base drums, loud enough to shake Gilgamesh.

They were not, though, loud enough to damage him.  He backed off two steps, no more.  A moment, and he had control of himself again. 

Echo ran toward the FBI hotel.  Gilgamesh had expected it.  He also turned and ran, keeping between Echo and the FBI hotel.

In the Detention Center, Tiamat had kicked out a window and attempted to squeeze her way through.  The escape was on.

Zaltu, who had been on the top of the warehouse all day, motionless, still didn’t move.

“What Thomas the Dreamer gave me protected me from your ‘echo’ attack,” Gilgamesh said, as he ran.  “Now what are you going to do?  In a moment, Keaton’s going to swoop down and grab Hancock, and…”

“So?  You still can’t do anything to me,” Echo said.  The other Crow glared at Gilgamesh and continued to run.

There probably was something he might do, but Gilgamesh wasn’t sure what.  All Thomas had said was ‘this will equalize things, save that some Crows are more equal than others’.  Cryptic.  Non-informative.

Tiamat ran toward the inner Detention Center wall.  Her first leap didn’t carry her over the wall, but after a long pause, a second one did.

It was up to Gilgamesh and his wiles to stop Echo.  “You go into the hotel and I will as well.  I’ll tell the FBI that you’re a Major Transform.  A Crow.”

Echo stopped.

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me,” Gilgamesh said.

In the Detention Center, Tiamat ran into someone and stopped.

Rover (Interlude): November 15, 1966

Rover loped through the pine trees until he got to the wide cleared pathway where the towers carried the wires over the low mountain.  He stopped at the edge of the trees, sniffed the air, and howled in frustration.  The moon had gone another half way through her courses, and as he had feared, they were back.  He was too far away to catch them with his ability to sense the good loving, but he smelled them.  He remembered their scent.

He was an idiot.  He had made another mistake soon after their last confrontation: he had chased some sort of running Monster that looked like a cross between a giant rat and a giant rabbit, and it had plowed into a
bus
at a
stop sign.
  He had taken the Monster there among all those people, raped a few women, beaten up a few men who got in his way, and killed the man with the tiny
gun
who shot him.  He wondered what the men who made
newspapers
would think of the rat-rabbit thing, as it wasn’t one of the Monster varieties who made the headlines. 

Whenever he growled, nearly everyone either froze or ran.  He liked that.  He liked it so much he had ambled into a grocery store a day later, growled everyone out of the grocery store, and pigged out on the meat section until he could barely move.  He didn’t try anything like with the teeth that had gotten him into trouble before, and to his surprise, after good loving and all that food, a day later he
had gotten some of his words and memories back.  Unfortunately, he found a limit to how many of his words and memories he could recover: he hadn’t regained anything from before he became Rover.

He swore he was smarter than he had been, though.

He didn’t want yet another confrontation with those good loving-filled hunters.  He loped back the other way, and only went a half mile before he stopped.  People filled the pine hills.  People with
guns
and bright
flashlights,
stretched out in a thin line, but close enough together to keep each other in sight.

Coming toward him.

He went off at a right angle to avoid them, straight up the hill, and pulled up short.  Yet another line of people awaited him.  These didn’t move.  Instead, they squatted in holes in the ground.  One of them caught a glimpse of him and fired a shot over his head.

Rover snarled.

Another shot, over his head.  They weren’t trying to shoot him.

I’ll bet if I charged them, they would, Rover thought.  His stupid half was talking again.  He turned around and went the last direction, along a ridgeline and down a steep slope to a small pass that cut the ridge in half.

A third of the way down, Rover stopped.  About a thousand feet ahead, he sensed something
different
.  Like the fake Monster lady, this one had nearly as much good loving in him as a Monster did.  Only this one’s good loving was much more visible than the good loving of a Monster or the fake Monster lady, a huge glowing bank of fog, much larger than the tiny man in its center.  Complex and structured.  The beauty of the fog bank called to Rover. 

Rover whimpered.

The little man stood alone, except for a Monster at his feet, a wolf-Monster.  Not chained, not half dead.  A free Monster, peaceful and at rest, right next to this little man.

The little man had tamed the Monster.  Impossible.  Monsters were mindless fighting machines, not a thought in their heads.  Yet the Monster sat at the little man’s feet, tamed.

“Come on down here, Rover,” the little man called up to him.  The little man didn’t have a
flashlight
; like Rover, he could see in the dark.  “Let’s talk.”

Rover took two steps closer and stopped.  “Rover scared of little man.  Go away.”

“You can’t hurt me, Rover,” the little man said.  “But I can help you.”

“Help me not kill people?”

“Yes sir, that’s the idea, you lame-brained overgrown puppy dog,” the little man said.  “Now get down here.  My name’s Occum, and, well hell and damnation, I guess I’m going to be your master.  Someone’s got to save you, and I guess since you came to me, I’ve drawn the short straw.”  He paused, which let Rover try to figure out what the little man named Occum had actually said.  He didn’t understood all those words.  “Try and be nice to Brunhilda, she’s…”

Nice?  Bah.  This Occum didn’t know squat about him and Monsters.  He rushed up to the Monster, grabbed her by the neck and raped her.  Took her good loving.

“Stop that!  You’re killing her,” Occum said.

Rover didn’t bother to answer or stop until he drained the Monster of all her good loving.  Oh, that felt good.  Too bad she died, though.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” Occum said, between clenched teeth.  “So I guess I’m next?”

“No, master,” Rover said, and rolled over on his back and presented his belly to Occum.  With all this good loving in him, he felt happily lethargic.  “You’re not named next, you’re named Occum.”

Occum rubbed Rover’s belly, and Rover’s tummy rumbled.  “Now I eat Monster.  Monster’s good eating.  Then rape master.”

“What?” Occum said.  “Forget it, Rover.  No.  Rover does not rape master.  That’s rule number one, got that?”

“Okay, boss master Occum.”  Boss Master Occum looked like he was about to start crying.

“Dammit, how’d Shadow talk me into this one, anyway?” Occum said.  “I’ll wring his goddamned starched shirted neck.  ‘Rape master’?  How am I going to get myself out of this one?”

Rover ate the Monster, and the world was good.  He had gotten himself out of his mess and ‘getting them out of this one’ was his master Occum’s responsibility now.

He wasn’t a stupid magic dog anymore.

Yes, the world was good again.

Carol Hancock: November 15, 1966

I stumbled, half from shock and half on purpose.  When I recovered, I had
Dr. Zielinski’s knife in my blood-slick right hand and McIntyre had his honking big gun resting on my forehead.

McIntyre was alone.  I couldn’t understand why he came here alone, but his giddy excitement implied he had just won a bet.  He understood Arms and Patrelle didn’t, and Patrelle thought him foolish to think Carol Hancock, Housewife and Twit, might be able to pull off an escape.

“Oww, my ankle,” I said, softly.  Anticipating.

“Stand up anyway, bitch,” McIntyre said, matching my quiet voice.  He wanted the credit for my capture alone.  I stood, slowly.  He moved back, gun still pointed at my forehead.  I froze in confusion.  This couldn’t be happening!  I was far enough along in my escape that this
hurt
.  I could
taste
my freedom.  “Don’t you dare pull any of your goddamned crap…”

Something snapped inside me, some switch turning on that had never turned on before.  The world around me vanished, all except for McIntyre.  I sprang at him, fast fast fast.  He flinched in surprise as I backhanded his gun hand with my left hand.  His gun went flying.