The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1)

by Randall Farmer

  Even a little progress on the juice pattern thing. She had identified several of the components and could create them on command. She had even shown Zielinski one of her secret juice tricks, the photographic memory one, and they managed to represent the trick with a juice pattern diagram. He still didn’t realize how many similar tricks she knew, terrified to show anyone but her science people.

  So her reward? Torture!

  She had called Tonya, not as much to complain but in search of some solace. Help in coping. Tonya told her that she needed to learn the pain trick, and how each Focus mastered the pain differently. “Everyone who deals with Arms gets tortured by them one time or another,” Tonya said, voice deep and sad. “Arms won’t even start to respect you unless you can sneer at torture.”

  Gail prayed.

  She prayed for forgiveness, for strength, for patience, for safety for herself and her household.

  As she prayed, her sensitive gut decided to churn. Crow. Watching her from somewhere nearby. She stood, forgetting her prayers. Uneasy from the encounter with the fake Monster, and with an unusually unhappy gut, she decided this Crow was an enemy. She didn’t like the sensation of a watching enemy, but didn’t know what to do about the problem. She strode to the back of the church where her guards waited. They heard her footsteps, and John Guynes opened the door for her.

  She had almost felt on the brink of an answer in the dark church, but there would be no more prayers this evening and the answer slipped away. She told John to take her home. In the car, restless and uneasy, she considered her misery and the surrounding sense of threat, and resolved to tell Teacher to slow down, or else she would have to quit the training.

  Carol Hancock: July 26, 1972 – July 31, 1972

  I picked up the next from the inbox, Tom’s latest report on my people’s moneymaking efforts. Yes, the mansion they found held the loot we wanted to steal, but he smelled a trap, and wanted me to take a look. I penned a ‘drop it and go on to something else’ note and picked up the next.

  Late afternoon sun shone through four narrow windows onto leather guest chairs and an oriental carpet. I had finally managed to set up my new home in Detroit to my specifications, including a nice, big office, with an oversized oak desk. A credenza stood ready to accumulate a new set of files and records. I planned to be substantially more careful about making backup copies this time around.

  I missed Chicago, and felt vaguely unfaithful to it by settling here, but I had made my decision, and Detroit didn’t deserve a half-assed commitment on my part.

  Better drapes wouldn’t hurt, either.

  I flipped through Ila’s report on the Focus politics of the Midwest region, speed-reading the highlights and thinking about other things. Gail’s ‘we need to slow down or else’ ultimatum bothered me. Why did she send this to me in writing instead of in person? What sort of top-end Focus wouldn’t attempt to use her charisma to get her way?

  What sort of Arm was I to even consider a positive response to such a demand? Had she gotten to me personally? Bah. I was still going to beat her into next week for having the temerity to even think of giving me an ultimatum.

  The next note was from Hank, and germane. ‘Carol, after Gail was able to follow my technical discussion during the meeting in your War Room after the tagging ceremony, I decided to do a bit of poking around, and I’ve found out some disquieting news. Gail’s household has what they term the ‘science department’ or ‘science directorate’. The orange haired woman leads the team; she, improbably, has a Chemistry BS. Her husband has an Engineering MS. Van, Gail’s husband and History PhD, is on the team and he’s been cross-training in all the Transform Sickness issues for three years, as has Gail and her aide, Sylvie (my source for this, through Jeannie). They know about my papers and can talk intelligently about them. Sylvie said they understand the danger of what they term ‘the Bitch Patrol’, and implied Gail is sitting on hundreds of Focus tricks she’s terrified to use in public. Gail told me she has perhaps a half dozen of these. We need to be very careful, both…”

  He continued for three pages of potential problems and suggestions for how to deal with them.

  Gail held back on me. Her ultimatum note implied she was over her initial terror, and thought she had a way of fighting back if I didn’t comply. Hmph. Not much on the tactical or strategic combat sense, unless…

  Right. Think like a Focus. She’s saying we needed to renegotiate. This wasn’t an Arm-style dominance challenge. I picked up the next item from my inbox, an interim report from the detective agency Amy and I were using to identify the perp behind the Phoenix Church Massacre. The cover of the overly long report said they had nothing, but I leafed through the report, anyway. What was nothing to a PI might be something to me, and of the unknowns stalking me and causing me problems, the Phoenix Church Massacre perp bothered me the most.

  Why now, for Gail? As usual, thinking like a Focus hurt my brain, but I did work out the answer: Gail connected pain, in her mind, to Focus bitch Adkins. So her twisty Focusy hindbrain thought of this as a social and political attack on her, as I had just said ‘we are doing this next’, without elaborating on the reasons why. I sighed.

  Students should follow orders without those pesky ‘why’ questions.

  Gail wasn’t a baby Arm, though. I would need to talk her into…

  Wait just a second. I banished the Gail thoughts from my head and focused on the PI’s report. Page 8 contained an eyewitness description of ‘her boots were covered in ugly fat lizards’, while on page 28 the PIs reported the FBI investigation team concluded the perp wore woman’s size 6 boots.

  Bass. Those were her size 6 armadillo intaglio cowboy boots, and the eyewitness had been a terrified fool who didn’t know an armadillo from a lizard. All vestige of ‘Focus thinking’ fled my mind and body as I growled in response to Bass’s game and all her kind notes and evasions since the Eskimo Spear presentation. She more than challenged me, she attacked me.

  All other priorities dropped from my mind in the face of the challenge. For this, she would suffer.

  ---

  I scoped Bass’s lair out with my field glasses. Her home was a non-working ranch just outside of Ft. Worth, a desolate place if I had ever seen one.

  Bass was going to pay for her actions, and pay big. She owed me.

  I was pissed. Oh, more than pissed. Livid. No, worse than livid. There weren’t words to describe how angry I was. She had played me. Her rampage in Phoenix cost me lives and territory. I would take all this from her, including all the reasons behind her actions.

  I approached Bass’s place from downwind, and the closer I came, the worse the place stank. I wondered what she was doing here to cause such a reek.

  Her spread included an old single-story ranch house, a barn and an equipment shed. The dirt driveway led through grass dried by the hot Texas sun to a crushed limestone parking area lined with long-dead leafless bushes. A wild overgrowth of salt cedar and mesquite hid the buildings from the road. Closer in to this threatening and inhospitable place, I separated the smell of death from the other smells, the fear of victims, old blood, and pain.

  This was no mere ‘Arm basement’ where she tortured a few victims to chase the twisty bugs out of her head. This was industrial.

  I had never suspected. I don’t think any of us had, save for Amy and her wild theories about Rayburn, Bass and Keaton.

  I put down my field glasses for the last time and walked unhidden toward Bass’s house. Unhidden, but disguised. I wore the metasense image of Arm Bartlett, juniormost Arm, and non-threatening. One of Bass’s people greeted me before I knocked. I metasensed Bass walking, not running, up from the oversized basement she had added to her Buchenwald.

  The filthy woman at the door was gaunt with starvation, and the hollow look in her eyes spoke of something not quite sane.

  “Run.” I put the full force of my very predatory presence into my one word. She ran. As did Bass, realizing this wasn’t a social visit.
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br />   I stalked into the old country farmhouse, my footsteps not drowning out the whimpering from below. Another of Bass’s slaves, a man as gaunt as the woman, his body malformed and limping, fled from me in horror.

  Bass finished her run up the stairs and she charged me, armed with a bloody knife, ready to do murder to defend her territory. I crouched into my stalk and glided toward her, smooth and dangerous and on the hunt. As soon as she saw me, though, Bass stopped dead and bowed in deference to me, giving rank. Interesting. I wasn’t mollified.

  “Ma’am,” she said, a single breathless word, shocked at my presence, terror warring with uncertainty and territorial defense in her mind. “What do you want with me here?”

  I answered Bass’s question by laying her out before she could react, burning juice in the process. The bitch surrendered immediately; she crawled over to me and groveled, screaming her humility and obedience.

  “Get up,” I said, as I kicked her in the ribs and sent her flying into the cupboards. She cowered as she stood, back against the sink and began the ‘yes ma’am’ routine. I ignored her and looked around at her dusty house. Something reeked here, beyond the death and destruction emblazoned in my nostrils, and I didn’t know what I sensed. Anger and grief fed the dark beast inside of me. This bitch cost me Sammy and Consuela, lost in the ashes of my burned home. This bitch cost me Chicago.

  “Show me around,” I said. I thought I understood Bass and her wants and desires, an Arm reminding me of my pre-CDC withdrawal self. Wrong. I hadn’t ever done industrial scale cruelty, or even come close.

  I needed to rectify my lack of understanding. Now.

  “Certainly, ma’am. I’d be glad to,” she said. Her chirpy, cheerful tone clashed with the blood and sweat dripping from her. Underneath the natural terror of an angry senior Arm in her territory and the raw hostility sloshing inside her due to my dominance display and violation of her territory was something else. Something calm, something of expectations met. Her inner calm pissed me off, but I banked my hostility for the moment. “If you’ll come this way, ma’am?” She led me down into the basement. “I’ve been researching the effects of pain and stress on normals and new Transforms. I’ve been improving my interrogation abilities.” Industrial strength sadism with a rationale.

  She turned to watch me, hoping for some sign of my reaction to her words, but I gave none.

  Her first three examples sickened even me. Two men and a woman, confined, naked, in various stages of destruction. Bass had one of the men laid out on a table, with large portions of his skin flayed off and pinned carefully back. Blood ran in little rivers to a drain in the floor. He whimpered as I passed, the source of the whimpering noise I heard when I first came in.

  Bass had removed the woman’s fingers and feet; a chain running through her rib cage attached her to the wall. No eyelids, ears or tongue; her eyes didn’t see and she made no sound because Bass had removed her vocal cords. This victim was the first anomaly, as our leader and teacher, Keaton, reserved her darker tortures for men, primarily rapists and wife abusers, and had passed her prejudices along to the rest of us.

  Small burn marks, as from a cigarette, covered the second man, a geometrical pattern over his entire body. His eyes opened when I passed. “Kill me,” he said. “Please, kill me.” Bass moved to go to him, to punish him for his speech. I glanced at her and she stopped moving.

  I ignored the pleading man and examined the rest of her large torture chamber, the source of the downwind stench of Bass’s lair. Human pain and suffering lived here, shacking up with death and corruption, and they had given birth to the terror and insanity twins. Her chem lab, where she produced her torture chemicals, lined one wall. Another set of shelving contained her instruments of torture: chains, whips, wires, surgical instruments, picks, probes, nutcrackers, saws and clubs. Cigarettes and soldering irons. Blowtorches and electrical probes. Hand-cranked generators, barbed wire, fishhooks. All the equipment of the modern torturer. The next shelf unit over held the medieval instruments, the thumbscrews, branding irons and other unfamiliar mechanical devices. Tables and racks and chairs with hooks and rings covered the center of Bass’s torture chamber, fighting for space with blood encrusted buckets. Blood had soaked into the floor and ceiling and stained them uniformly black.

  Trophies covered the shelves on the far wall, some rotting in the dry air, others preserved in formaldehyde. Brains, eyes, tongues, genitals, breasts, lips, hearts, livers – hell, an entire collection of human parts. Transform parts. Monster parts. Animal parts. She had them all.

  The beast inside me began to respond to this. My inner darkness liked death and suffering, and as I grew used to the industrial scale of the place, Bass’s lair began to arouse me, twisting me, stirring my eagerness for cruelty. I felt the heat on my face as my body responded. I wanted to revel in this orgy of suffering.

  When I became The Commander years ago, when I got political, when I decided I liked having people love me as well as fear me, I had shoved my darker Arm urges deep into the depths of my mind. Those urges had never left me, though.

  Bass relaxed as she caught the scent of my body. She knew of my secret pleasures, pleasures taken only from the Transforms’ enemies these days. She echoed my arousal with her own, visions of Angry Arm chased from her mind by fantasies of the two of us engaged in industrial-scale torture.

  If I gave myself to madness, to pleasure, if I abandoned my responsibilities and my people, this is the path I would take. The dark road called to me. Bass’s lair, or something similar, would be my daily reward.

  “This is magnificent, ma’am,” Bass said, intense and seductive. “This is our natural right. There’s no reason to deny ourselves, and we have a right to the pain of our prey. We stunt ourselves when we deny our urges. This is what we’re made for. In time, all humanity will live in terror of us. Think of it, ma’am! All we need do is claim the power and teach our peers the ways of true pleasure.”

  I ignored her ideology of torture, shoving away my own desires to rid myself of my touchy dealings with the other Major Transforms and normals. Nor did I kill Bass for the implicit challenge buried in her attempted seduction. Instead, I left the torture chamber, went upstairs and walked over to her equipment shed. I needed to understand the full nature of her cruelty.

  Bass stored five more people in the equipment shed, along with the body of one more, recently dead. The small shed was closed and dark and very hot. She kept her victims chained to a single support post, with no sanitation and not enough food or water. The people had fought each other in their desperation.

  Bass had lined the shed in human skin.

  She still regaled me, uneasy now, with the glories of her cruelty. She thought my arousal meant approval, but now she began to fear I wasn’t so easy to seduce.

  The barn contained Bass’s exercise equipment, as well as four more people, the maimed and the dying, trapped in a place of slow and agonizing death. One woman, her orifices sewn closed, writhed in madness. Another man lay still, his right leg black and swollen with gangrene. Another man had small straws sewn into his body, openings through which filth seeped both ways. The fourth person, raisin-wrinkled and sexless, reeked of poison and shivered with an uncontrolled twitching. Bass prattled on about organ transplants and the pain of organ rejection, and how much worse the process became when the organ donor was an animal. How one tortured using diseases. How one broke minds with sound, chemicals, darkness, and disorientation. How pain turned any victim into an animal. “It’s not about right or wrong, ma’am,” she said. “It’s about power, who has it and who doesn’t.”

  I tuned her out when I finally scented the true heart of the disquiet I felt when I first approached the place. In the barn’s attic.

  Children.

  The last of my arousal fled. Bass noticed my interest in the barn’s attic, but made no comment or defense of the horrors that most assuredly lived there.

  I left the barn and stalked back to the house. Bass resumed
her presentation, but I no longer listened. The world around me shrank to tiny pinpoints, at the focus of my gaze. I judged, my judgment final and harsh. In her kitchen, I turned to Bass and loosed the predator within. She flinched, not understanding my move from arousal to anger. I beat her until she no longer flinched.

  “Three choices,” I said, many minutes later. Rivulets of Bass’s blood spun lazy streams across the dusty floor. I had offered these choices before, but never so harshly. “Realize the error of your ways and I will end you, cleanly. Deny the error of your ways and I will do to you what you have done to your victims, pack you in a shipping crate and airmail you to Romania, where you can survive or die as you see fit. Or you can realize the error of your ways and seek restitution, in which case I will tag you and you will be mine.”

  Bass shrunk away from me. “Please,” she said, shivering, leaking terror. “The tag. Show me your way and I’ll follow.”

  “Very well.” I took her tag, a foul and seductive thing sitting in my mind and screaming of madness. I inhaled, disgusted, as no tag I had ever taken affected me this way. Still, this was my tag on her, and now I owned her.

  The warmth of victory spread out, deep inside her, as from a chancy but well-played game. I didn’t understand her madness; she had lost here, today, and decisively. Disgusted, I turned away, planning on how to fix Bass’s broken and addled mind.

  “No more torture chambers and research projects on pain,” I said. “Find a different way. Use what you’ve learned, certainly; but find something to help us. To this end, you’ll call me every week, and visit my place in Detroit once every month.” I paused, and she nodded. Had she wanted someone to stop her? Perhaps we all did, I thought, reading into her actions my struggles with my own beast. “We need to save your people who are salvageable, and put the rest out of their misery.” I paused, grabbed her tag, and burned juice into my predator effect. “First, we’re going to talk.” Bass peed herself and barely kept herself conscious.