Tonya Biggioni: March 27, 1968
“You’re crazy, boss,” Danny said. “You want us to leave you alone, here, tonight?” Tonya sat on the couch of the suite so graciously funded by the CDC, attempting to occupy her mind, or at least her hands, with counted cross-stitch. She hadn’t been successful. Danny stood with his arms crossed, too agitated to sit.
“That’s what I said.”
He shook his head, afraid to ask the security questions he needed to ask. “Out with it, Danny,” Tonya continued. “I’m not going to bite your head off.”
Danny sighed. “Why are you doing this?”
“Remember our last visit with Keaton? I’m almost certain I’m going to have another one, tonight.”
“Keaton? Here?” He paced, wary. “You need to be back in Philadelphia.”
“The household won’t be safe until I resolve this. I need to resolve it alone.” Tonya, unhappy, saw no other choices. Running would be a disaster. The last thing she needed to do was trigger an angry Arm’s hunting reflexes. Nor would she explain to anyone what was going on. This was between her, Keaton and God.
“Last time the bitch showed up she killed one of our household Transforms, boss. You need every gun you can get.”
Every gun she could get. That was the problem. Her bodyguards thought in terms of guns, bombs and mobs. The household had been remiss in physical training. This wasn’t the middle ages, right?
Real Arm capabilities, though, made a mockery of standard Focus bodyguard training. Until she got them trained to handle targets with Hancock and Keaton’s capabilities, her bodyguards were less than useless against an Arm. Even after advanced hand-to-hand training, she wasn’t sure they would be able to handle an Arm.
“Phil Howard was an idiot. Any Transform really a part of our household would have had enough sense to obey my orders. In any case, this isn’t the same kind of situation and I need to handle it alone.” Phil had been another one of her project Transforms, and a singularly stupid one.
Danny sighed, unhappy. “I’m not stupid enough to disobey orders. I don’t like leaving you in danger, though.”
Tonya didn’t discount the danger of the situation, but the last thing she wanted was to set up a situation where she appeared to be challenging Keaton in any way. She trusted her past dealings with Keaton enough to suspect that the Arm would at least give her a chance to talk her way out of this mess before killing her out of hand. Unless Hancock died, in which case all bets were off.
Tonya raised an eyebrow. Danny grimaced. “All right. So, what do you want us to do, boss?”
“Establish a large perimeter, a hundred and fifty yards out. I don’t want any outside interference tonight.”
Sky: March 27, 1968
By the time they reached Kali’s chosen vacant house, Sky had recovered to where his metasense no longer cycled on and off. Now, he was just stupid from low juice. Terrified. Stressed. They bundled Hancock into an empty bedroom, wrapped in the two blankets recently wrapped around the juice zombies. She had been on an IV for food and liquids. They had cut the IV line and now Kali removed the IV itself. Hancock remained unable to take food or water.
“Shit,” Kali said, and put her head in her hands. “She’s a fucking vegetable. I thought there would be some damage, but this is ridiculous.” She sat on the floor of the empty living room, leaning against the wall, exhausted.
“Feed her the Transform,” Lori said, across the empty room and no less exhausted. Sky curled on the floor next to her and she held him comfortably close. Tina, Tim and Eileen rested, nearly as close to Lori as Sky. The businessman lay on the floor on the other side of Keaton, almost as if she stood guard over him.
Kali glanced up, growled, and put her head back in her hands. “Can’t. That’s my Transform.”
“What?”
“I’ve been around this piece of meat for too long. He’s mine,” Kali said. Kali’s normal demeanor had vanished. After she awoke from taking juice from the Transform in the van, she was no longer a drill sergeant or a monster from the nether depths. She was calm, introspective, bantering, and rather tolerant. The only disquieting Kali-like thing remaining of her was her obvious physical interest in Tina. She even told the rest of them they had done a great job. Compliments!
Kali, apparently, was an extremely success-motivated person.
“One of those Arm predator behaviors?” Lori said. “How are you going to fix Hancock, then? Do you want Inferno to try and put her back together?”
Kali kept her head in her hands. “I’ve goddamned trained myself to be able to refuse prey. This shouldn’t be happening.” She paused. “The time inside the CDC building screwed me up. Every second I spent in the fucking place my control slipped away more. You’re going to need to watch yourself.”
Lori nodded. “Then this isn’t just me. I had to toss all my normal juice patterns and I can barely move the juice, like I’m a baby Focus inside a household that’s gone real bad.”
The rest of them chimed in with their own maladies. Sky said he felt like he was coming down with the Shakes again.
“You can’t take Hancock. For one thing, any Transform near her will get juice sucked. She’s even tried to take juice from me.”
Lori shuddered. “Gurgling poo! If she starts to recover, her body will start to work before her higher mind functions do. We would need to keep her chained in the garage to keep her from taking the Inferno Transforms and being that close to them would drive her crazy. So, what do we do?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to get into this until later, but there’s a reason I chose this house. Focus Biggioni is staying in a hotel not too far from here. I figured we would let Hancock have a little talk with her before we left. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Now, I’m afraid we’re going to need Biggioni’s help. She owes me. If you give me your word not to feed my kill to Hancock, I’ll go get her.”
“Tonya?” Lori said. “She’s going to roll every single one of us, you know.”
“Let her try,” Kali said. “She’s crossed the line with this escapade. If she doesn’t behave, I’ll give her juice to Hancock. If Hancock goes Monster she’ll at least be easier to feed.”
“Hell. All right. Go get her. I promise I’ll guard the zombie.”
Gilgamesh: March 27, 1968
Gilgamesh spent a lot of time meditating as he waited for word on Tiamat’s rescue. Coming home from drawing dross from Keaton’s graveyard, full up and feeling a little confident from all his meditating, he thought about his troubles with creating offensive dross effects.
What if he produced the dross effect ahead of time?
Here he was, with an almost infinite supply of dross, plenty of time to waste and the need to keep distracted. What better opportunity to experiment?
He closeted himself in the safest part of his apartment with a pile of supplies. Late at night, he found something that worked: the sick-up tennis ball. Just what every discerning Crow needs, producible when the stress was low, for use when the stress was high. He smiled, deciding he had hit the sweet spot for personal development for a Crow of his age.
Recipe: take one old tennis ball. Sick-up as normal on tennis ball. Clean up the skunky dross save for what remained within about a foot of the tennis ball. Once clean, force the remaining sick-up into the tennis ball. Stabilize the dross in the tennis ball, as if you produced a piece of dross art. Throw the tennis ball within a couple of days at an enemy, though, or the weapon would go bad.
Perfect. He would be able to prepare them ahead of time so he didn’t need to worry about his panic when he got in trouble. He would be able to carry several of them at once. They didn’t actually use much dross, so he would be able to prepare three or four of them every morning. They didn’t even take long to create.
Not only that, as with any form of dross art, he could tune his dross to specific scents, or juice patterns, or emotional content. Maybe other things he hadn’t thought of yet. Right now, his control was terribl
e, but he bet his control would get a lot better with practice.
This was a weapon, he thought with a satisfied grin, as he tossed the tennis ball rotten egg in his hand. This particular rotten egg would douse the area in an overwhelming stench, numbing the noses of anything tracking him by scent. A skunk effect literally as well as figuratively.
He wondered how many of those innumerable letters about dross art concealed valuable technical information about what a Crow could do with dross. Enough to be worth a search, he suspected, and retrieved and re-examined every dross art letter in his little stash. Yes, he did find some interesting ideas in his letters.
Nothing, though, about his little rotten eggs. At first, he thought they might be something no one would talk about in a letter. When he found nothing in his letters even remotely connected to his creations, he began to suspect that he might actually be the first Crow to discover this trick. He shivered with this realization, goose bumps running up and down his arms. Hard to imagine, given his youth and ignorance. Anything useful able to be discovered by a Crow of his stature had already been discovered. Right?
His question made him consider his own stature. He was a year and a half old, almost as old as Sinclair when they first met. He controlled his panic, at least a little. He had come up with a useful trick that he now strongly suspected was either new or uncommon.
He had money, at least from a Crow’s perspective. He had contacts among the other Major Transforms. He had organized the rescue of an Arm – an Arm! – from captivity…if it worked. Not only that, but by living near the Arms for so long and subsisting on an abundance of Arm dross, he had spent months at a time at high juice, with the enhanced intelligence abundant dross produced. The high juice was apparently enough to let him come up with some non-standard young Crow tricks.
He was now a successful young Crow. His surprising realization raised more goose bumps on his arms.
What was he turning into?
He had no idea. The thought both scared him and gave him hope.
He wondered how much of his drive to produce a weapon came from hanging around Arms. Certainly other Crows didn’t seem to think weapons were necessary. Yet for an Arm, weaponry would be a first priority. Next time the Skinner wouldn’t turn him down when he volunteered to help.
Now wasn’t that a cheery thought?
Gilgamesh laughed and the laugh echoed off the walls of his apartment. A good belly laugh, not a whisper at all.
Tonya Biggioni: March 27, 1968
Tonya waited on the small second floor hotel room balcony, weighing strategies and trying to calm herself. She tried to do her cross-stitch, but her nerves wouldn’t let her. She tried meditation, and the Rosary, but they hadn’t been able to still her thoughts. Every half hour, she checked her wristwatch. Midnight passed, then one, then two, then three.
Around four, she heard a distant explosion. She scanned the horizon. To the west, somewhere off in the distance, beyond the nearest hill, something burned brightly. The CDC’s Detention Center was about seven miles in that direction, but utter destruction seemed a bit extreme, even for Keaton. Soon, sirens echoed through the night, dopplering into the far distance. Tonya watched the show for a long time, morose as the blaze burned.
“She went and rescued Hancock without me,” Tonya said, quiet. “I was sure she would …” A juice-filled hand covered her mouth and cold steel touched her throat.
Shit! How did Keaton sneak up on her!
“We need to talk,” a voice whispered in her ear. Tonya took firm control of her reactions, took a deep breath and nodded. “Hold still,” Keaton said. “I’m going to pick you up and carry you to somewhere safer.”
The knife left her throat and Tonya found herself in the air, carried like a sack of potatoes across Keaton’s shoulder. They hit the ground below the balcony with a muffled ‘ooph’ of her own and Keaton sped off running into the night through the small greenbelt behind the motel, still carrying her. Baggage, she muttered to herself, starting to find the situation and the obvious danger involved humorous.
“How did you learn to mask yourself from my metasense?”
“Oh, that?” Keaton’s mocking laugh was ugly. “Focus Rizzari and I have been trading tricks. Seems as though you Focuses can learn to do things I thought only Arms were capable of. You ever have a stand-up with Rizzari again, you’re going to be in a whole hell of a lot of trouble.”
Tonya grimaced, disgusted.
“She’s a useful Focus, unlike some others I know who’ve forgotten what side they’re on,” Keaton said. As Tonya feared, Keaton had decided to fillet her. At least verbally. So far. “I even got her and her anthropologist friend to teach me some advanced science, so I can understand their current research.”
“Be careful,” Tonya said, her voice muffled against the Arm’s back. “Not only hasn’t the Council authorized Rizzari’s research, but also much of what she’s doing is in direct opposition to Council orders. Why are you wasting time on such highly technical esoterica, anyway?” The last thing Tonya wanted was yet another reason for their enemies to kill Keaton. The first Focuses had a long track record of smacking down people who learned too much, a list including Focus Rizzari, several times.
Keaton hissed, frustrated. “Tell me, how has not knowing the technical details behind the Transforms helped you at all in, say, the past month? How good were your recent executive decisions based on jack shit knowledge of what’s recently been discovered?” She hopped up an incline, and hopped again, this time catching hold of a wooden deck with her free hand. She kept climbing. “Tell me, if you learned that at least eleven different standard juice fractions interact with both estrogen and cortisol receptors, would you even know what I’m talking about or why this is important? If you read that Monster juice has teratogenic fractions and pro-testosterone amplifiers, would you even know to connect this data to tales I’ve told about Chimeras and young Arm accidents with Monsters, and why it’s all important in this situation? I could go on like this for a half hour, bitch, but the details aren’t important. You’re not technically competent to be making any decisions about anyone except yourself right now, and possibly not even that.”
Ouch. Keaton’s critique was far too accurate. One of Tonya’s biggest mistakes in this mess was not taking the time to sit Zielinski down and have him tell her the medical details behind his claims about Hancock. She even picked up on echoes of Hank and Lori in the way that Keaton spoke.
“I admit I made mistakes,” Tonya said.
Keaton wasn’t finished. “You owe me, bitch. Hancock fell into withdrawal for over a day.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“No, this was the fault of your goddamned political supporters,” Keaton said. Stopped. Tonya took a quick peek and noted they stood on the top of a house overlooking an eighty foot drop into a rocky stream bed. “You were just following orders.” Utter contempt.
“I didn’t interfere with the Transform the Feds wanted to feed to Hancock.” Tonya paused, and continued, much quieter. “I was ordered to break her, though.”
“You’re nothing but a tool. My tool, now, for what you put Hancock through.”
Like hell. A gust of sudden anger snuffed out Tonya’s good intentions, fueled by hours of film about Keaton’s relationship with Hancock. “You’re one to talk. After what you put Hancock through during your so-called training, you don’t have any cause to complain about the hell anyone else puts her through.”
Keaton snarled and tossed Tonya to the roof of the house, hard enough to bounce. Tonya scrambled hard to keep from sliding off the sloping roof to the ground two stories below. Before she clawed her way to her feet, Keaton got in her face, hand clenched tightly on Tonya’s throat as the Arm lifted her to head level.
“Fucking bitch! What the crap did you think you were accomplishing by your little Arm-breaking exercise, anyway? What the fuck danger did Hancock in Chicago pose to your prissy little Philadelphia household?”
“
The Council thought – and I thought – she was behind the wave of Transform killings and snatchings.” Tonya took a deep breath and forced her anger down with her charisma. “I was wrong,” Tonya said, as contrite as she could force herself to be. With her charisma tuned to Keaton. “I’m willing to make amends for my mistakes. Are you?”
Keaton snarled again and threw Tonya out over the chasm, over a hundred feet below. Shock and terror filled her: she would survive the fall, but her healing trance would knock her out for hours, if not days. Scavengers would get to her long before anyone would come by to save her. Two words into a Hail Mary, though, Tonya felt a hand tightly grab her right ankle, nearly dislocating her hip. The world careened sideways and stopped when whatever held her landed in a tree. Then her hip dislocated. Tonya muffled a scream, and waited, head down, now about fifty feet above the rocks.
“You’re my tool until Hancock’s fixed, bitch. Understand?”
“Yes,” Tonya choked out. “I’ll help in whatever way I can.”
Keaton flipped Tonya around to land back on the Arm’s shoulder, hard enough to knock the wind out of Tonya. “I don’t want any more of your goddamned fucking backtalk concerning my training techniques, bitch,” Keaton said. “Not word one. I can learn too, dammit.”
And that, Tonya knew, would be the only acknowledgement she would get from Keaton about the mistakes in her earlier treatment of Hancock.
Keaton leapt from tree to tree and dropped back to the ground on the other side of the streambed. After they crossed to the other side of the greenbelt Tonya saw a homestead with a ‘For Sale’ sign out front. Some hippie psychedelic VW bus sat in the driveway, reeking of juice. Inside the house Tonya sensed a Focus, three Transforms, a goddamned Crow, one Transform zombie, and the remains of an Arm. Tonya fixed her hip, healed her cuts and scrapes, and readied herself for the new and likely hostile audience.
Sky: March 27, 1968
When Kali returned a few minutes later with a Focus in her arms, Sky did a cursory check of the Focus when she got within a kilometer and almost fainted. The Focus held a faint echo of the juice pattern the white Focus had! Sky yelped and ran, panicked, though not for more than five steps. Lori ran him down and grabbed him with a bear hug.
A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) Page 31