“Dr. Zielinski?” He turned his head and looked over to the door. Jeremy, one of the new Inferno recruits and the one he had grabbed to train as a battle medic, was motioning for him. “Connie needs you.”
Hank turned to Ellen to apologize for leaving, but she had already grabbed his office telephone, probably to try to call Gail. Ellen frowned. Busy signal. He walked off with Jeremy as Ellen tried a different number, and found Denise Pitre by his side.
“I smell more trouble,” Denise whispered. The beleaguered first Focus looked almost healthy, just in time for the world to go to hell around her yet again. He nodded.
Their troubles had started right after they finished the household merger with Stone Point. Protesters, led by Focus Pansy Wilson, trickled in and started haranguing them. Although Focus Wilson was the only Focus present, the protesters included Transforms from two other local Focuses, one of whom was supposed to be working with Inferno, as well as dozens of normals.
“By the way,” Denise asked, “where did you get a Pack Mistress tag from, anyway?”
Oops. Hold it… “You sensed that?”
“No, Ellen asked me about it,” Denise said.
“I’ve been pledged to secrecy,” Hank said. “Sorry.”
“Hmmm.” Denise lost herself in thought as they walked down the hall through the Inferno section of the former nursing home. Hank could hear chanting from the protesters in front.
Kim’s voice echoed through his head as he walked, from his days in the no-hope Transform bin. “The arrogance of ‘saving the world’ as an excuse for what you’ve participated in is simply astounding.” Was he doing that again? Was his superorganism work nothing more than a ploy to raise his own status? He needed to make sure Inferno’s innovations didn’t get swept under the rug as usual. What, in the five years since he codified the Transform training methods, fewer than one in ten Focuses used them. Appalling. How much work had he put into spreading that technology? Virtually none. Hell, he put the work out there and then ignored it, going on to other projects. Juice music looked likely to go the same way, as perhaps one in twenty Focuses showed any interest at all, so far. He had dropped the ball and let others do the grunt work. They failed. He knew he was persuasive enough to be able to lobby for acceptance among the Focuses; he had politicked his way to department head at Harvard Medical. Was this another horrible personal problem he…
“Quit that,” Denise said, hissing at him and yanking his juice up and down several times to get his attention. In the end, his juice level was right where it started, but the flux drew beads of sweat to his forehead. “No time for that now.”
Despite the momentary pain, Hank found a smile creeping onto his face. Denise understood his depression, and realized that he responded well to harsh love. “Yes, Denise,” Hank said, absolutely perfectly contrite. Karma.
They found Connie in the household headquarters, at a desk, a phone to her ear. She cocked it up against her shoulder and bared her teeth at him, more of a growl than a smile. “Hank, good, someone’s available. We’ve got police problems. With Van out, I’d like you to take care of it.”
“Sure,” Hank said, bending his mind to the problem at hand. Readying himself to deal with the authorities.
“Can I help?” Denise said.
Connie opened her mouth to talk, but the phone rang. Line five. She put the first call on hold, stabbed the line five button, asked if they could wait, and then put them on hold. “You feel up to this, Denise?”
Denise nodded, her eyes sad, and didn’t say anything. The first Focus didn’t need any reminders about her recent troubles, but it was Connie’s duty to confront such issues.
“Good. Grab some bodyguards.”
Tim Egan wheeled into the office on his wheelchair. “Where’s Van and Daisy?” he asked, agitated.
“Out with Count Dowling and Arm Webberly. Why?”
“Focus O’Donnell and I have a hysterical Gail on the line. She thinks Van and Daisy are in big trouble, something she picked up while meditating.”
Hank winced.
“I’ll talk to the Director,” Connie said. “You help Denise here find some bodyguards.”
Tim turned to Denise, startled. “Focus Pitre?”
“Yes?”
“Ma’am, sorry, let me help.” He wheeled off into the main corridor, and Hank followed. Two of Ellen’s winery people ran by, followed by two Commoner part-Monsters, chattering something about firearms.
“What’s going on?” Tim said.
“Police trouble,” Hank said. “We’re up.”
“Can I help you, officer?” Hank asked.
The officer in question looked like he was about to die of stress. Danielle, one of the Stone Point barony Monsters, blocked the officer’s way.
It didn’t help that the crowd of protesters shouted “Monster, Monster, Monster…” repeatedly, in sing-song, and that they had tossed a half a brick, several rocks and a coke bottle at Danielle already. A line of six police officers was trying to keep the protesters back. The protesters looked like they were perfectly happy to be kept back, away from a quarter-ton of angry tiger and the Inferno defenses.
Count Dowling had talked with the local police late last night, back when the barony finished its move onto the back lawn of the Inferno nursing home facility. They already knew the Monsters were ‘tame’. Hank looked around, and found Lady Sharon, the Warden, with Gretel by her side, about two hundred feet away, surrounded by protesters and police, with that damned Focus Wilson giving her grief.
Hank heard a loud honking behind him, and turned. A line of nine identical Plymouth Dusters, now all blaring their horns, waited at the Oak Valley entrance. Followed by a small moving van. Hank winced. Focus Gladchuck and her household. They wouldn’t be merging with Inferno, but were here to join forces for defense. Webberly had appropriated the nursing home parking lot for Focus Gladchuck and her household.
Nice to see Focus Gladchuck hadn’t lost her impeccable sense of timing. The parking lot was currently filled with protesters, and they didn’t look like they were going to move, no matter how loud the horns bleated.
The police officer remained too flustered to respond, so Hank walked up and put his hand on Danielle’s head. She growled. He hadn’t heard her growl, before, with all the damned racket going on.
“Officer Connerly?” Hank said, loud, after a glance at the police officer’s nametag.
“I’ve received a complaint from Focus Wilson about illegal firearms, sir.” He paused. “Inside your buildings. I’d like to take a look.”
“Given what’s going on today, if you’re going to do that, I think we’d better do it properly with a search warrant,” Hank said.
“Search warrant?” Blink, blink.
Dammit, the Focus had gotten to the man. Denise, at his side, covered her mouth for a moment to hide a snicker. “Officer,” Focus Pitre said with a small smile on her face. “Why don’t the both of us go have a word with this nice Focus Wilson.”
A few minutes later, Hank steadied Denise as she walked, shaken, back to Connie’s office.
“Get the Crow Master,” Denise said to Margot, the first Inferno Transform they met on the way back in. Denise’s voice was about two octaves higher than normal, weak and ragged. Deadly Margot headed off at an athlete’s sprint, her previous activity instantly forgotten.
“Sit,” Hank said. Something shook Denise, something he couldn’t sense. Denise had won the battle of charismas with Focus Wilson and sent her off to huddle with her people, hopefully to leave. Then this.
“Not until we get to Connie’s office,” Denise said, hissing between clenched teeth.
Hank nodded, willing to do anything for Denise. She spewed charisma like a cut artery and pumped him high, over the stimulation optimum, as if he was a bodyguard in a firefight. Not Focus Pitre’s normal style.
He half-carried the Focus back to Connie’s office, eyeballed Sadie out of the nearest chair, and deposited Focus Pitre into it. Sadi
e was all over the Focus in an instant, let-me-help, let-me-help.
“Denise?” Connie asked, then to the phone “Gail, we’ll do absolutely everything we can. The Schubers are with Arm Webberly, if they’re wounded, she can take care of it. Yes, yes.” Connie hung up.
Denise stared at Connie, now with a vaguely shell-shocked expression on her face. “Focus Wilson carries the stench of Hilltop on her. You’re in horrific danger. Wastebasket!”
Connie grabbed her wastebasket, tossed it to Sadie, who held it in front of Denise Pitre. Who vomited forcefully. She didn’t miss.
Crow Master Zero glided in and circled the room until he found a nice piece of free wall to warm with his back. “Hilltop? Focus Patterson’s lair?”
Denise nodded, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and then vomited again.
“I’m a Crow shaman, not a Crow wizard,” he whispered. “What am I supposed to do?”
They all looked at each other, blankly.
“Ah, ugh,” Denise said, and Hank pulled a handkerchief out of his suit pocket and handed it to the Focus. “Thanks.” She wiped her mouth and the back of her hand. “I’m going to break down in hysterics in a few minutes. Keep my people safe,” she said. “I don’t know what level of skills Focus Wilson has, but your Monsters and your Nobles could possibly be in grave danger, Master Zero.”
Hank nodded. Patterson had despised the Chimeras and Monsters, and she and her people created elaborate defense methods against them, several of which he experienced in Pittsburgh. One of them, in fact, had transformed him. “Can you keep track of each one of your Commoners in your mind with your metasense, Master Zero?” Hank said.
“Yes,” the Crow Master said, his voice thin.
“Are you close enough to do direct support to their internal stability as Barony members?”
Zero nodded. “From what I’ve read, that should be enough, unless Focus Wilson is as well set up as Focus Patterson was.”
Denise bared her teeth. “She’s not. I got her, dammit, but when I did, I felt it. The greasy feeling of being in Hilltop. I’m probably overreacting.”
“Right now, under siege as we are, overreacting is just fine,” Connie said, supporting her Focus with words and charisma. “However, breaking down in hysterics wouldn’t be, Denise. You’re stronger than that.”
“You never faced it.” Neither Connie nor Sadie participated in the Patterson attack.
“I did,” Hank said. He fought there and lived. At least so far. “We defeated Patterson.”
Hank added his charisma to Connie’s, and both of them put their hearts into steadying their Focus. A moment later, Denise relaxed, and let herself melt into the chair. She dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse.
“Thanks,” Denise said, and sniffed once. “Having household support like this is just so unbelievably wonderful.” Her four-woman attendant crew stuck their heads in the door, and then rushed in to cluster around their Focus, touching and giving support. “I couldn’t chase Focus Wilson away for good. I did get her to stop siccing the police on us, at least for the moment.”
“Wilson was twisting the minds of those cops?” Connie said. Hank nodded. “We need better quality police here.”
“We need a miracle,” Chevalier said, walking into Connie’s office. Everyone turned, startled. “I just got a call from one of my Crows who’s been watching the approach points. We’ve got twelve plus semis of Hunters and crew on the way, coming off of State 88 into Stockton. That’s about fifty miles away, worst case only an hour out. Twelve semis, minimum.”
Hank closed his eyes and shivered. There was no way they would be able to execute any of their plans to take the fight outside of San Jose as Webberly wanted. The fight would be inside San Jose. Worse, Carol was going to spring some sort of disgusting sneak attack on the Hunters, which would end up occurring inside a heavily populated city. This would be a public relations disaster the likes of which the Transforms had never seen!
“Something’s going on with Arm Webberly,” Connie said. “Can you locate her?”
Chevalier closed his eyes, and sat cross-legged on the floor, between Crow Master Zero and Denise. “She’s not moving,” he said, a minute later. He paused, and then elaborated: “She’s about four hundred feet outside of Focus Cuccaro’s trailer, in her trailer park, and neither she nor Count Dowling are moving. I suspect they’re in some sort of trouble, but I can’t make out any details through my repeaters.”
Cuccaro. Hank walked the path in his memory to remember where Focus Cuccaro’s place was. Castro Valley, on the east side of the bay, thirty miles to the north. Cuccaro was one of the Focuses they leaned on to gather in San Jose. Right now, thirty miles was too far away. Haggerty and her people were on their way, but they were too far away, as well.
The sound of honking horns grew louder from outside, and Hank heard the nasal tones of that damned fishwife Gladchuck as she bellowed at the protesters to get off ‘her’ parking lot. Connie started flipping through her rolodex, likely searching out Focus Cuccaro’s phone number.
We’re all going to die, Hank thought to himself. We’re scattered like a gaggle of geese and Enkidu’s going to steamroller us.
Count Frederick Dowling (3/25/73)
“…and then, on his next trip, the Perfessor brought four lawnmower engines, different makes and models, and all old, rusty and shot to hell, and told us this’ll do you,” Daisy said. “As if we would ever have a need for non-working lawnmower engines!” They all laughed, even Rose Webberly. ‘The Perfessor’ was Daisy’s father, and she was telling stories about the early days of Focus Rickenbach’s household. Gail’s transformation nearly broke apart her family, and had done nearly as bad a number on Van’s family, with Van’s mother and Daisy’s older sister Abby eventually refusing to have anything to do with Gail’s starving household of Transforms.
“Turn here, on Desperado,” Van said, doing map duty from the back seat. Unnecessarily, as Rose knew the location of every Focus within 100 miles of the Bay Area. They were close enough to Focus Cuccaro’s compound for Fred to metasense them, but not close enough to see them. Fred steadied himself; all day long he had sensed a storm moving at them from the northeast. The Hunters. “That wasn’t the worst. We had just combined a dozen normal households into one, and we had a surplus of the little stuff. Mom didn’t listen to Gail, and filled the pickup with all the discards they were storing in the barn.” The chain link fence marking the edge of Cucarro’s compound came into view, and in a moment, the front gate. The gate was open and unguarded, which didn’t bode well for getting anything useful from them for Hunter defense. Rose slowed but drove on through. This was a sad area, showing the effects of years of too much pollution and too little money. “So, here we were, on starvation rations, and what we got were boxes of canning equipment, washboards, and unmatched plates and glasses. Washboards!” Van chuckled. “What do you do with a wash…”
The first shot passed through Fred’s upper body and threw him up against the windshield, cracking the glass. The rest of the volley whizzed by without hitting him, too many shots to count. He wasn’t the only one hit, not with him covered in brains and blood. The van rolled once, but he didn’t know whether Rose flipped it on purpose. It ended up on its side with Fred in the air. He punched open the van’s door, up, the only way it could go with the van on its side, and leapt out, looking for targets.
They were far enough inside Focus Cuccaro’s compound to be visible to the Focus’s ratty trailers. Not much cover here, just a few persistent bushes, with an overgrown field to the north, an old paper products factory to the south, and railroad tracks to the west. The trailer park overflowed with people, including a small group of girls with jump ropes in their hands staring from just ten feet away from him, far too close to the ambush.
The attackers? Monster hunters. No one else used ammo that massive. Not close, either, and not coming from Cucarro’s trailers. He heard a small ‘whump’ of explosion, and saw from the
corner of one eye that it came from the van’s leaking gasoline catching fire. The little girls ran screaming from the explosion. Out of the corner of his other eye he saw a wounded Rose dragging Van out of the tipped vehicle. In a flicker at the edge of his vision he saw Sidney, one of his male commoners, crawling out the back of the van on his own. Sidney stopped and collapsed to the ground, shot, and blood quickly began to pool around him. Dowling roared terror, and for his effort caught three more three-quarter inch wide bullets. He dropped, dazed, to the ground, and bled. The fourth member of the party, Daisy Schuber, stayed in the van. It was her brains and blood that covered him.
A moment later, he heard gunfire from a different direction. From Focus Cuccaro’s trailers. Not at him, but at whoever shot at him.
The rest of the van caught, then, an explosion that singed the tattered remains of his clothes. Hell, his clothes were on fire! He rolled, and rolled again, ignoring the pain, and the sound of screaming in his ears.
More children ran for cover and various trailer park inhabitants either ran for cover or did stupid things like sticking their heads out their doors to see what was going on. He located the attackers behind a large pile of dirt and refuse in the field to the north, about five hundred feet away. Far too close. Fred spotted a drainage ditch running beside the entry drive, rolled himself into it, and then lay gasping with exhaustion and blood loss. More shots from Focus Cuccaro’s trailers; at least they pinned down their attackers, now.
As was he. He had been wounded in fights, but never this bad. Not by gunfire. When a Monster round went through you, you noticed. He was missing part of a leg, blown off just below a knee. Not sure which one, though. His thoughts remained muddled, despite the adrenaline flooding through his system.
Could he crawl? Yes, he could crawl. His guts leaked out, yes, but he could crawl. Where was the Arm, dammit? There, same drainage ditch, but on the other side of the burning van. Where were Sidney and Van? Fred crawled, ignored the burning vehicle as the flames flew over him on the wind. There, Sidney. Dead Sidney. Transforms didn’t live after multiple torso hits from three quarter inch wide slugs fired from high powered rifles. Hmm. Someone’s arm. Rose’s? No, Van’s arm. Shit, he was a normal. Minor damage like that would kill him. He might even bleed to death, such a silly thing. Fred grabbed the arm in his teeth, not sure why. Oh, right. Rose could heal others. Not very well.
An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Page 25