All Beasts Together (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  Hank wanted to watch Lori but couldn’t. The harem of Monsters and part-Monsters, or what was left of them, were getting far too close. The horse Monster dropped, head blown off by Monster rounds, some of them his. Then the tiger Monster was on them.

  The Inferno Monster hunters were way ahead of him; half of them had already dropped their firearms and taken out their swords. He had been more than appalled by their sword collection, but they told him Monsters respected swords and swords made good weapons to use against Monsters, giving those with the heavy firearms enough room to finish them off.

  Hank wanted nothing to do with any swords or knives, or hand-to-hand combat of any variety. He had no skills or training in this area, and even less inclination to get involved.

  Tim and Tina intercepted the tiger Monster and their swords shredded her like a blender’s blades. Hank decided to trust their competence and fired once more into a part-Monster woman with a shrunken head and a beak, less than sixty feet away. He heard the roars of the Chimera turn into whipped puppy dog yelps. Tim and Tina stopped chopping the tiger, which turned and ran from them, dripping blood. He had never seen a sword fight like this before. Definitely post-human in quality, already showing many benefits from the advanced Transform training.

  “Rick’s hit, Doc,” Tim said. Hank grabbed his kit from where he had set it down, at his feet when they had reached the culvert and now twenty feet away. He crawled over; out of the corner of his eyes he spotted the remaining pack members turn and flee. One more dropped from Inferno gunfire before they fled out of sight.

  Rick Henderson lay on the ground, his belly clawed open and his left arm in tatters. Hank started to clamp and sew; he smelled juice as he worked, the Focus pumping Rick for all he was worth.

  The Focus put her hand on his shoulder. “Slow down, I’ve got him,” she said. Zielinski slowed, relieved.

  “Lori, what’s our status?” Ann asked.

  “I couldn’t kill the boss Chimera, but he had a trainee with him, a rat, and I got him,” Lori said. She stank of juice herself, only worse. Was this the odor of bad juice? He had never been able to smell it before. “Six of the pack are dead, and they’ve left two wounded behind we need to finish off.” She sat in the snow and shook her head. “These Chimeras are going to be a big problem,” she said. “They’re much much harder to kill than Monsters, at least with my tricks, and for Major Transforms those Chimeras weren’t strong at all.”

  “We didn’t lose anyone, Focus,” Tim said.

  “I know, but only because they’d never run into anyone who fought back before,” Lori said. “They had no idea what they were doing. It’ll never be this easy again.”

  “In that case, Lori, I think we should chase them down and finish them off,” Ann said. “Dead Monsters tell no tales.”

  “We’ll give it a try, but don’t hold your breath.”

  Hank finished with Rick five minutes later. He would live, but only because he was a Transform. Even so, Rick wouldn’t be functional for weeks.

  After they bundled up Rick and stowed him in one of their vans, they motored off in pursuit.

  Enkidu: February 29, 1968

  They moved at night, and this night’s march would take them into Chicago and into the confrontation with the Talking Arm. Enkidu tried to keep his spirits up, but the message of the clouds shook him. Disaster stalked them, which didn’t make any logical sense. The Talking Arm was friendless, save for Gilgamesh, and he posed no threat.

  He and his pack skulked up the bottomland between the Chicago ship canal and the Des Plains river, slipping between the brush, invisible to the eye save for the clouds of steam they exhaled. This was the only way into Chicago from the south that wouldn’t leave them exposed.

  “Stop,” Enkidu barked. Tonight, he wore his full Beast form, the great hulking wolf.

  “Master?” Cleo asked, a whisper. Her form was invisible to the eye, another shadow among many.

  “There’s something up ahead, close,” he said. “I can metasense…”

  A weapon coughed in the distance. A shell exploded far above them, a flare hanging in the night sky, lighting them up and fouling their night vision. As the flare lit, another weapon coughed, and another, five in a row.

  Marcie exploded, instantly dead, blood and scales and body parts spraying Marian next to her. A trail of smoke hung in the air from whatever weapon had hit her.

  “Down!” he and Cleo screamed. None of the other shots hit, detonating near them and spraying them with dirt and shrapnel. His pack hit the ground.

  The flare above them died. Enkidu motioned for his pack to crawl forward.

  Crack!

  Marian stopped moving. Enkidu glanced over and saw she had taken a head shot from a Monster gun. Nothing remained of her head but a few shreds of flesh and the cracked bottom half of her skull.

  He still couldn’t get his metasense to focus in on the enemy. Whoever or whatever it was, it moved quickly, back and forth up ahead of them.

  Crack!

  Lucile’s shoulder exploded.

  Dammit!

  They had walked into an ambush. Someone was hunting them.

  “Covering fire and run like hell,” Enkidu said. His pack, or the remains of it, did as he said.

  After he and his pack crossed the Des Plains River, to try another way into Chicago, they got lit up again by another flare. This time he and his pack dove in the water and gave up on the plan.

  The Talking Arm had friends after all.

  Gilgamesh: February 29, 1968

  Four Beast Men. Gilgamesh awoke with a start and couldn’t believe his metasense. Four Beast Men. Four! Not hidden this time. Not from him, anyway. They came as a group, loping quickly, at about twenty miles an hour, straight toward him.

  No time for phone calls. He scampered out of his window, crawled down the side of the flophouse, and ran to his truck, a baby blue Chevy, purchased with Tiamat’s help after she lost his old pride and joy somewhere in Wisconsin.

  At least the Chevy was in better condition than his old truck. It always started when he turned the key.

  He motored toward Tiamat’s place, where she paced in the kitchen, stewing about something. The Beast Men didn’t follow.

  He stopped the truck a few feet outside of Tiamat’s metasense range and waited. The Beast Men continued toward his flophouse room. Didn’t they know he had left? He inspected the four carefully. He knew only one of them, the Beast called Odin. The other three felt young and mindless.

  Crap. Odin was a pack leader, now.

  Carol Hancock: February 29, 1968

  A rock rattled the side of the house, startling me. I put down the baloney sandwich and crept out the back door. Garage, patchy snow, dead grass, leafless shrubs, and a couple of undersized juniper bushes, no different from any other normal winter night. A light breeze rustled my bushes in the overcast night.

  “Carol,” I heard a whisper. Gilgamesh. Close by, his voice filled with panic. I damped my metasense, knowing if I tried to search him out that way, he would flee.

  “Here,” I said. The sound came from the west, maybe a couple of houses over. If I tried to approach him, he would flee. Crows.

  “Four Beast Men are rooting through my flophouse room. Right now. I don’t know what’s going on!”

  “Four?”

  “One of them is the one who introduced himself to you as Odin. The others feel younger. I think they’re mindless.”

  Time to put my plan into action. Finally.

  “Is your truck nearby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you be willing to lead me to your place?”

  “No.” He almost shrieked. “I’ll tell you the address, though.” He did. Gilgamesh wasn’t planning on living there anymore. I’ll say this for Crow survival instincts: they worked well. Sometimes I wished I had even the slightest smidge of them.

  I made my phone calls and got my heavy weapons.

  I caught up with the pack of Beast Men as they wer
e leaving Gilgamesh’s flophouse. Odin was no longer a bear. He was a tall man, say eight feet tall, with a vaguely human face. They were able to change their shapes! The other three were identical: large half-men half-wolves.

  Werewolves! Several of my and Bobby’s ideas coalesced in my head, answering a question about how Transform Sickness could have happened before and yet be missed: it wasn’t missed, it lived in our myths. How close was the reality of the Chimeras to the myth of werewolves? Did they limit their mythic correspondence to the ability to pass as a man, or did they resemble mythic werewolves in other ways? Silver bullets, perhaps? Did they have the monthly-male-allegorical-menstruating time-of-the-month problems of their mythical cousins?

  Now wasn’t the time for me to speculate on my idea. “I told you to stay off my turf!” I said. He and his werewolves were almost to the fence at the far end of the used car lot next to the Edens Expressway. I stood by the fence at the other end, a hundred yards away, separated by hundreds of cars. I waited for them to charge, but they didn’t.

  “Your kind isn’t wanted here,” Odin said. He glanced around him into the darkness, uneasy. He had a plan, but something had gone wrong. “Leave Chicago or die.” His pathetic comment revealed more of his plight to me. Screwed he was, and he knew it. He once thought he would kill me today.

  He didn’t think he was in the slightest bit of danger, though.

  “You’re going to die and I’m going to kill you,” I said.

  His werewolves snarled.

  I snarled back. They backed away.

  Odin laughed. I heard sirens in the distance and a crackle to my left. From the corner of my eyes, I saw flames leaping from the flophouse. “Go ahead and try,” he said, twitching an almost human ear at the sound of the sirens.

  Heh.

  I slipped behind an oversized pickup truck. Raised my one handed M-16 and let off a burst. The werewolf on the farthest right fell. Odin picked the werewolf up and ran; the other two werewolves followed, up and over the fence. I paced them for the length of the lot, alternating between my single-shot Monster stopper .707 and my M-16. I plonked Odin’s back several times to no effect before I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I leapt the fence, ducked across the street and into an alley. A moment later, two police cars rounded the corner behind me, lights flashing and sirens off. They gave chase to Odin and his werewolf pack, now a wolf pack running on all fours down the middle of Dempster. They hadn’t changed shape, just their mode of locomotion.

  As an Arm, I had no options for dealing with them. As an Arm, I couldn’t reveal myself to the police.

  Being an Arm wasn’t part of my plan.

  I slipped through the alley shadows to return to my car, grabbed my kit, and changed from Carol Hancock, Arm, into my newest identity: Ramon Gonzales, Monster hunter extraordinaire.

  I gave chase in my vehicle of the day, a little Ford Mustang, catching up with the fleeing Chimera mob in moments. These Skokie police were my people, though they didn’t know it. I had, through the few top officers I had partly suborned, created my Ramon Gonzales identity specifically for this.

  “What are those things, sir?” I asked Gailey, the officer in charge, after I strode out of my vehicle, weapons in hand, as if I owned the world. I knew I was a sight to behold, with my naked over-muscled arms, my hard leather pocket-encrusted vest (nicely hiding my flattened breasts), my motorcycle helmet and visor. And armpit hairs. Bah. Of all the indignities of becoming an Arm, growing out my armpit hairs to give credibility to my disguises stood low on the list, but still. Situations like this paid for every damned hair.

  Gailey, who had met me once in passing as I established my bonafides, curled his lip in nicely proper utter and total disgust.

  “It looks to us like some Monster is out to have some fun today. She has some honking badass wolves under her control, too. Think you can help?”

  “Leave them to me,” I said, with enough deep voiced macho to make a sane woman vomit. “I need a ride.” To their amazement, I crouched on the back of the police car and rode the damn thing after the Chimeras like a chariot. By now, the werewolf I had wounded was mobile again, running along with the pack. A car came toward us on Dempster, but after the driver spotted Odin, his werewolves, the police, and me on the hood, the driver turned wildly right on a side road with a squeal of tires. From my blue and white chariot I took down first one, then two, then three of the werewolves with my .707. The police contributed by firing their small caliber weapons into the crew, minor harassment that when added to my Monster stopper rounds turned into serious problems. Odin continued to run after his werewolves fell; his fear was strong enough to pick up through my metasense. I had surprised him.

  I reached the first of his werewolves and leapt from the car to behead him with my current foot-long favorite Chimera-knife. By then, the third I dropped had stood back up. He charged.

  I holstered my favorite Chimera-knife and slid the oversized sword I had specially made for me out of the scabbard I wore over my back. I growled. The werewolf yelped and tried to skid to a stop because of my predatory presence, but too late. I trotted forward at a human sprint and beheaded the damn thing before he had a chance to shake off my predator effect. The last werewolf? He played dead until I made him so.

  It didn’t take silver to kill them, thankfully.

  Baby Chimeras shouldn’t be let out of their kennels to fight. I worked up more of a sweat sparring at Pete Sanchek’s boxer gym.

  Up ahead Odin was now far outside my metasense range, cutting through alleys and now doing his best to lose the pursuit. I and the Skokie police followed, doing our jobs, but we never caught sight of him again.

  Instead, while on the hunt, I caught the cayenne pepper scent of someone quite unexpected.

  ---

  How had I caught that scent from so far away? I had no idea. I ditched the Skokie police and followed the scent north in a stolen car. I also acquired a tail, hanging way back, never closer than a half mile. I guessed Gilgamesh, seeking protection, and I welcomed him to it. He had saved me from a nasty surprise.

  I shouldn’t have spotted my tail. He was well outside my metasense range. I had no idea how I knew, but I did know.

  After three hours of driving, I finally found the source of the scent in southern Wisconsin, not far over the Illinois border. I pulled over at the sign for a KOA campground as the sun made its first subtle hints of oncoming day. Pickup trucks, a couple of vans, and one big pavilion tent filled the campground. I parked my stolen Volvo (I had been in a hurry) by the side of the road and armed myself. I kept the weaponry hidden or pointed to the ground, though, and carefully damped my predator vibes, just like when I talked to Gilgamesh. As I walked in, I picked up the odor of Monster-juice and Chimera battle sweat. Odin’s expected help had indeed run into a little problem. Heh.

  The bodyguards didn’t notice me as I slipped through their careful defenses, nor did my targets. I relaxed a little when I spotted Focus Rizzari and Hank at work, with Ann Chiron. They were, of all things, cutting up a corpse. They had set up a metal gurney in the center of the encampment, and a couple of household members held lanterns to provide light. The corpse was too small to be a Chimera and too human to be a Monster, but it still stank of Chimera and Monster juice. When I got close I saw they were working on taking apart the corpse’s brain, and I froze in place.

  To my utter shock and amazement, like a wave washing through me and stirring the deep places under the surface, I fell in love with the Focus.

  Focus Rizzari had changed. Her metapresence, formerly so cold and distant, had become alluring, beautiful, and alive. Her hidden cayenne pepper soul, still burning hot, now hinted at a wonderful flavor if cooked just right. Her spirit danced with life, energy, mystery, and power. Her very presence lured me in like nothing I had ever felt before. I stood like an idiot gaping in wonder.

  The damn juice strikes again!

  Love. I marveled. Not sex – love. I would have been happy to s
pend the rest of my life staring at Lori.

  Focus Rizzari muttered a string of incomprehensible words, which meant something to Ann, who wrote things down on her chart. Hank stood silent, just watching, but his heart raced and he clasped and unclasped his hands as they worked. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen him so agitated. Focus Rizzari removed the front cerebrum, to reveal a bunch of inner brain things that didn’t look like brains looked like in my science books. She pinned back some brain parts to expose a little s-shaped part with a pulsing and living lump on it. Hippocampus and metacampus.

  I understood Hank’s agitation now. The female corpse was one of the half-Monster Chimera pack women, a black-skinned Caucasian with a thick pelt of black fur and inch-long claws on her hands and calloused feet.

  I forced myself out of my love-induced stupor. “Uh, Lori?” I asked, ignoring the formalities. “What’s a half-Monster doing with a metacampus? Have the damned Hunters found a way to turn their pack women into Focuses?” This impossible creature carried a juice load about a third of the way between Transform and Focus levels.

  Everybody near me except Lori dove for cover and pulled out their weapons, their adrenaline spiking. Lori looked over at me with her eyebrows up. “You’re supposed to be a blasted killing machine half way to being an animal, not an academic,” she said. She had sensed my approach, but hadn’t bothered to tell anyone. I smiled.

  “Zielinski here taught me the basics,” I said. I had seen a picture of a hippocampus and a metacampus in “Transform Variations”, a book Zielinski had been one of thirty contributing authors to. That and my Arm memory did the rest.

  Lori froze and her eyes opened wide, as if seeing me for the first time, and I slipped back into my own stupor. She reached out and took her hands in mine, staring into my eyes. My heart melted as I stared back. Our attraction was mutual. How had I missed the wonder of her when we first met? What had changed?