All That We Are (The Commander Book 7)

by Randall Farmer

  He didn’t understand Rogue Crow’s thinking. Even without knowing whatever tricks Kali had up her sleeve, this wasn’t a dangerous attack. Why split his forces? He should have had his Beast Men charge with the mob. Surely Rogue Crow didn’t think they would scatter from a minor attack such as this. Perhaps Rogue Crow sensed some bad vibes and just probed. Still, it struck Gilgamesh as bad tactics, too big a gamble for any sane Crow to take.

  He wished either Tiamat or Kali had been more forthcoming about the battle preparations and prearranged tactics. No longer among the trusted, he only knew about his orders, and no one else’s.

  Desultory gunfire from the roof picked off attackers, and Gilgamesh shivered. He had never been in a fight like this before. Too much gunplay. Focus bodyguards and Carol’s thugs held the roof, and gunplay was their strength. Suddenly, Gilgamesh picked up Kali’s glow hundreds of feet in the air, moving at about a hundred miles an hour. He turned and cursed the normal human tendency to focus one’s senses on the ground, and hoped the enemy made the same mistake. Kali flew in, in a helicopter. He hadn’t recognized the sound because Kali flew, or rode in, some sort of military chopper. He had no idea where she got such a thing. Trust Kali to go over the top. Weapons erupted from the helicopter, a quick-firing machine gun, and dozens of Monsters and juice zombies went down. As Kali swung around for another pass, glass continued to tinkle from the cars the Arm riddled with bullets.

  Several of the Monsters made the leap up to the blasted open windows. Each of them in turn caught dozens of bullets from Focus bodyguards. Gilgamesh ignored their futile leaping and scanned the ballroom. His job was to watch their putative defenders and allies, to see if Rogue Crow had turned any of them.

  He found what he needed to find, but he found it too late.

  Gail Rickenbach

  Gail shrieked as the lights went out and the windows exploded. She had been about to go back to the dance floor and dance with Roger Grimm. The bride got to dance with everyone. Kurt grabbed her, and both of them fell to the floor. In the sudden dark, all Gail could think about were her parents and Van, as she watched and metasensed people tipping over tables. She had no idea where her parents or Van were, and she looked around, futilely.

  Chaos rippled through the former reception now. Bodyguards clutching Focuses. Juice moving like rays of light, everywhere, along tag links. In her near panic Gail’s metasense overwhelmed her sight, even though her night vision had gotten good in the last year. She heard gunfire outside of the no longer existing windows. People screamed about Monsters.

  Ten feet from her, someone moved away who wasn’t there. Gail saw a juice outline of a person, a Major Transform, an invisible person! How did that work! The person had a Crow’s fuzzy metapresence, but she never dreamed any of the Major Transforms had tricks this potent.

  Was this Rogue Crow himself?

  “Let me up! There’s an enemy among us!” she said, bellowing into Kurt’s left ear, which at least let her wiggle to her knees. “Where’s Van?”

  “I don’t know. Stay down.” Her senses and awareness of all around her, honed by her year plus as a Focus, threatened to overwhelm her. Over by the former windows: gunshots and screaming. Around her: falling chairs and silverware. To her left: a few plates that hadn’t been picked up by the waiters scattered in pieces across the floor. Rolling over the top of her: the stench of gunsmoke, the smells of the fourth of July, the raw smell of blood and the electrical fire smell of juice in use.

  The invisible Crow headed away. Despite the panicky Transforms running for cover making a hash of her metasense, Gail realized the invisible Crow’s target: Focus Biggioni!

  Gail grabbed Kurt’s collar and yanked, dragging him forward like a heavy bag of sand. She duck waddled, swinging her head and metasense back and forth. She didn’t metasense any Chimera-style metapresences outside, just a lot of people with faint juice smears on them, like they had been doused in juice but weren’t Transforms themselves. And Monsters. Gail had never metasensed one before, but she found something instinctively obvious about their metapresence. A helicopter, of all things, came in low through the now heavy rain, firing weapons into the parking lot area, taking down enemies by the dozen. Her parents’ car was out there! They would be so angry if it got trashed.

  Around a table, Gail caught sight of Tonya as the invisible Crow slowly and carefully made his final approach. Tonya had some bodyguards with her, as well as that goofy Focus Forbes non-entity. Wait. Gail hadn’t metasensed it before, but now with the lights out, it hit her: this was no Focus! Focus Forbes was an Arm, an Arm with a love at first sight metapresence! She talked to Tonya, so she had to be on the side of the good guys. Right? Yes, she was one of the important ones the Madonna-figure had showed her in her dreams. The one with the absurd title.

  “Tonya! There’s an invisible Crow coming toward you!” Gail said. No response to her scream, so she continued to scuttle forward. Tonya, one of her bodyguards, and ‘Focus Forbes’ looked over at her. The Arm motioned for her to stay down. They must not have heard her. Kurt tried to hold her back and force her down, but Gail motored forward anyway, dragging Kurt. The invisible Crow ducked down on the other side of the flipped over table to Gail’s left, out of sight from her, but not hidden from her metasense. He must have heard her scream. Dammit!

  A flash of lightning outside illuminated the window area, and she caught sight of Van, inexpertly reloading the Glock Kurt had made him carry today. Next to him was the screwy Dr. Madison researcher she had met once at Beth’s copy shop, his disguise as a Focus Forbes bodyguard no longer fooling her. He had a rifle in his hands, firing at a nearby bird-headed pack Monster. Beth crouched with them, along with a gaggle of her people, mostly non-bodyguards save for Bob Hilton. Dammit, why did this have to happen while Van was bending Beth’s ear! He was too close to the action! Her stomach soured as the afterimage of the flash vanished, and she lost sight of him again.

  Gail made it to Tonya, though now held by both Kurt and one of Tonya’s bodyguards. “Tonya!” she screamed, trying to lean forward so that she could scream in Tonya’s ear. “There’s an invisible Crow after you!”

  “Where?” the Arm said. Gail pointed, following the moving invisible Crow as he circled to the side. She continued to point, and the Arm moved like lightning to pounce on the invisible Crow. Trying to follow the motion of the invisible Crow and the Arm rolling and fighting on the floor with her eyes and metasense, Gail overshot and saw the strangest thing. Behind one of the tables, farther back and away from the fight, Focus Anderson and her bodyguards stood up. Weapons drawn.

  Gail paused in shock as two of them aimed their weapons at Focus Biggioni. Gail moved back toward Tonya. She was the only one looking in that direction, as Tonya’s bodyguard and Kurt had both joined the writhing fight on the floor. She was the only one between Tonya and Focus Anderson’s bodyguards when they opened fire on Tonya.

  “Bodyguards are people who will take a bullet for you,” Beth had said to Gail when they first met. Beth’s comment sounded so strange at the time, but over the past months, Gail grew to understand the idea. The concept did hurt her egalitarian instincts, but, logically, some people were worth more than others. To a household, a Focus was such a person. Being a bodyguard was an impressively selfless and important job. Gail greatly admired anyone willing to be that noble.

  Tonya was a Focus who was worth more than other Focuses, a teacher of Focuses, and a member of the Focus Council. She had done so much for Gail and asked so little in return. Gail’s gut reaction was instinctive, more than just hero worship. Gail would take a bullet for Tonya. She grabbed Tonya and tried to wrestle her to the ground. Blood flew – from Tonya. Gail felt one, two, then far far too many hammer blows to her own body. She and Tonya went down amid dozens of screams, and roars, and gunshots, and a fiery explosion somewhere in the distance.

  Gail’s mind detached from her body, something of the juice she had never expected. She saw all the bullet holes in her, metasensed h
er life ebb away and her body change over from its normal functioning to using the juice itself to keep her alive, unexpected and impossible. Gail felt her body, distantly, but could no longer move it. Her heart stopped. Her breathing stopped. She met Tonya’s eyes, and saw her own horror echoed in them.

  Gail faded, dying, and she couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

  Earl Robert Sellers

  Earl Sellers calmed his sudden nerves and studied the battle in front of him. Following the Commander’s deployment seven orders, the Noble attack squad had exited the roof at the first visible sign of the enemy, and had hid themselves to the far left of the reception hall, ready to block any flanking attacks. Although the orders hurt to obey, they weren’t to engage the first enemy group.

  “Dammit,” Earl Sellers said, still discommoded by the junk-level troops who had been part of the first charge of the enemy: normals, juice-zombies and barely controlled Monsters. “I see the main force, but I’m metasensing them as solid. Something’s wrong, here.” To his eyes, Enkidu and the leading Hunters led an impressively large group of pack women and younger Hunters across the far end of the parking lot. The rain picked up, and the wind changed, carrying with it an overwhelming stench of Hunter and Monster to them.

  Sky, still with them, nodded. “Illusions. Dammit, nothing but…”

  Gunfire! Within the reception hall.

  Sky flattened and moaned.

  Sellers metasensed chaos inside the reception hall. “We should hit them now,” Sellers said, keeping his eyes on the still climbing first wave of attackers. They had failed to breach the first floor service doors, which the Commander had ordered welded shut from the inside at the first sign of trouble.

  “No,” the Duke said. “We follow orders. We’re here to stop the Hunters, not the chafe.”

  “I’ve got them now,” Sky said. “They’re a half mile out, and they’re charging.” The Crow paused. “Dammit, one small group just popped out of metasense protections inside the hotel. It’s Odin.”

  A flank attack, what everyone had feared, and far away from them.

  “Stay put. Wait for the main charge,” Duke Hoskins said.

  It wouldn’t be long now. The real non-illusory Hunters and their more Monsterish pack women began their Terror roars from well behind the illusions.

  Tonya Biggioni

  “No, that’s Shad…” Gail grabbed her, interrupting her words. For a second, Tonya fought back, until the first bullet hit her, across her right breast and into her right shoulder. Then the second hit, a punch through her right biceps. By then, she stopped fighting Gail and let Gail’s momentum carry her down.

  To her horror, over a dozen bullets ripped into and through Gail, automatic weapons fire. Most hit Tonya as well, but the enemy used small caliber low-power weaponry, some of the bullets so spent by the time they reached Tonya that they bounced off her. As the two Focuses fell to the ground, Tonya felt a plea for help through Gail’s eyes, then nothing.

  Gail collapsed on Tonya, gone gone gone, rolled up eyeballs, slack dead weight, spurting blood in viscous blobs far too familiar to her. Tonya’s thoughts filled with panic and nonsense, a surprise to even her: How am I going to pay Gail back for saving my life if she dies! A connection to Gail built at the juice level, small and obscure, unlike anything… No, not unlike. This was the same link she had with Keaton.

  Did I kill us both by not allowing Gail to take me down immediately?

  Tonya’s thoughts turned to other subjects as her body switched over to juice metabolism. One of the spent bullets had clipped a branch of Tonya’s aorta, and all of a sudden, Tonya had her own problem to worry about.

  Tonya closed her eyes to create a juice pattern to focus her immense and well-practiced self-healing capabilities on one tiny blood-gushing aneurysm that threatened to leave her flat on her back for the next week, if not longer. She rammed her iron will through the pain of her dead, dying and wounded Transforms so she could still function without screaming.

  This was a fight, and she needed to be up and fighting.

  Gilgamesh

  Gilgamesh screamed and ran toward Focus Anderson and her bodyguards, readying his rotten eggs. He was too far from them to stop them before they gunned down their first targets, Tonya, Lori and Polly. As they turned to their next targets, which included him and Stalin, he tossed his rotten eggs at them and made for the ground, ending up between Focus Anderson’s people and Lori. Illusions of Monsters and Hunters popped up to distract Focus Anderson’s people from noticing the small-area metasense scramblers and juice pattern disruptors he rolled into their midst. Whatever panic he felt before fled.

  Lori, hit, fell, her glow starting to fray. She loosed, on the way to the floor, a hellacious juice pattern at Focus Anderson, unlike anything Gilgamesh had ever metasensed before, so potent it hurt to metasense. It flash-fried his juice pattern disruptor as if it wasn’t there and hit the traitorous Focus Anderson dead on, and spread in an instant to her Transforms. A mere instant later the Focuses and her Transforms’ juice destabilized and spewed from their bodies in a flood, like the élan draw of a Beast Man. They died, technically Monsters deep in withdrawal, before they hit the floor. Anderson’s normal bodyguards were unaffected.

  Polly’s Major Transform bodyguard had sensed enough of the attack coming to pull Polly behind him or her before the barrage. The only one in Polly’s entourage hit was the bodyguard, whose movements appeared human-normal, meaning this was an Arm or much more unlikely one of Rogue Crow’s Patriarchs. The bodyguard shrugged off the effects of the half dozen gunshot wounds as if they never happened, pulled out two firearms, and finished off Focus Anderson’s last two normal bodyguards with impossible single gunshots to the head of the by then moving targets.

  The bodyguard had to be an Arm.

  Outside the windows, the helicopter tumbled into the far reaches of the parking lot and burst into flame, but not before clearing the parking lot and revealing the ten-plus Hunter packs Gilgamesh had metasensed earlier to be nothing more than metasense illusions. Sooty smoke spread out across the parking lot, obscuring the next wave of real attackers from Gilgamesh’s sight. Kali dove out before impact and rolled free, then ran into this set of attackers. She vanished into the miasma of Rogue Crow’s antisense. Kali fought the main body of the attackers all by herself.

  Gilgamesh yanked his metasense back inside the ballroom. Lori, his warm, passionate lover, had killed a Focus and four Transforms…from halfway across a ballroom. In his wildest dreams, he never imagined any Transforms could do such things. She had reduced them to corpses and Arm-hot spicy dross in a fast second. Gilgamesh fought his growing panic as his metasense picked things out he would have rather never seen.

  Lori was dying!

  The hell with it. He took dross as he passed, too fast for safety. Gilgamesh hadn’t known that he could take dross so quickly. The panic. It had to be the panic. Lori was down, as were her bodyguards of the moment, Tina Williams and Bill Fentress. Blood everywhere. Brains everywhere – Tina’s, who had taken a head shot and more as she stood between Lori and the attackers. Gilgamesh reached Lori, grabbed her and howled. A full burst from a machine pistol had hit her, despite Tina’s protection, and nearly cut her in half. Her entire upper torso was a mass of bullet wounds. He had no idea what to do. He had seen Tonya survive Tiamat’s enraged attack, but this was much worse.

  “Don’t hate me for what I did,” Lori said, speaking without breathing.

  “I love you,” Gilgamesh said. First stupid thing that came to his mind. It had taken him long enough to realize. He owed Lori so much. She had saved his sanity back when he couldn’t even find enough nerve in himself to talk to Focuses, taught him the strength to deal with Major Transforms without panicking at the least provocation, and showed him the path he needed to follow to solve his Detroit mystery. He had made love to her, but that wasn’t love itself. Just fondness, a growing sense of partnership. Now, he finally recognized it as love. Now, when it was too
late.

  “I was bad. No Crow will ever be able to talk to me again. I butchered them,” Lori said. Her face grew pale from blood loss, and her eyes didn’t track.

  “Hush. Save your strength.”

  “For what?” Lori said. Her voice grew fainter with every word, and bubbles of blood burst from her mouth as she spoke. “I can’t survive this. I snuffed out a Focus. So easy. Just made her juice mine, turned it into Monster juice and ripped it out of her body. A Focus!” She coughed, and a river of blood spilled from her lips. “I’m a Monster. Too evil to live. Let me die, Gilgamesh. I love you so…”

  Lori’s juice destabilized.

  Gilgamesh howled.

  Chapter 12

  “There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.” – The Buddha

  Carol Hancock

  “You have traitors in your midst! I’m trying to protect Tonya! She knows I’m here, Arm Hancock. Ask her!”

  I had the Crow’s neck in one hand, and the other hand on his shoulder. He wouldn’t become visible. I heard his words and made ready to rip his head off his body if Tonya didn’t back the Crow up, when machine pistol fire ripped past, far too close, and from the wrong direction.

  I burned juice to think faster. I burned juice to move faster. To me, the world moved in slow motion.

  The fight inside the reception hall was going to hell. Traitors. My metasense identified the attackers as Focus Anderson of Cincinnati and her bodyguards. I had been deeked. Mr. Invisible Crow had to be Shadow; his body size and form matched Gilgamesh’s description of him. If Shadow was Rogue Crow, he shouldn’t be here, not without his Hunters, not in the fucking line of fire. No Crow, insane or not, would do this. Rogue Crow’s first wave had been a stupid attack, enough to get us to look the wrong way for a moment so Rogue Crow’s traitors among us would be able to fire into our backs.